If you’ve noticed that some of your Instagram videos appear blurry while others look crisp, it’s not your phone — it’s Instagram. The platform ensures that videos with high view counts are shown in better quality, while less popular ones are downgraded to lower resolution.  

It’s quite unclear when the practice started, but Meta had in 2021 deployed measures to keep up with the increasing number of videos uploaded to the platform after an earlier projection revealed they were running out of enough capacity to provide effective video uploads for all users.  

Meta’s executive Adam Mosseri shed more light on it during a recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. Part of his explanation, which was reposted by a Threads user, clarified Instagram’s approach to video quality management.  

“In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can. But if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views come early — we move to a lower-quality version. If it gets watched a lot again, we re-render the higher-quality video,” Mosseri explained.  

He further emphasised that this adjustment is based on aggregate data, not individual engagement, meaning a single viewer’s activity won’t directly impact the playback quality.  

 “We bias towards higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and larger file storage) for creators who attract more views,” Mosseri added. “It’s not a binary threshold but rather a sliding scale.”  

The major concern accompanying this knowledge is how the system might lean more in favour of creators or users with a huge following, to the detriment of small accounts. However, Mosseri clarifies that “In practice, it doesn’t seem to matter much, as the quality shift isn’t huge and whether or not people interact with videos is way more based on the content of the video than the quality.” Quality, he said, turns out “to be much more important to the original creator.”  

So, the next time your video looks a little fuzzy, it’s less about technical issues and more about Instagram’s way of prioritising viewership metrics.