Instagram video quality now depends on its engagement

Instagram, the famous photo and video sharing app, has silently made a significant change in the video quality.

If your video quality is blurry and your friend’s or someone else's is sharp, it is being done by the the software.

Meta-owned app CEO Adam Mosseri revealed recently that if an Instagram Reel has high engagement, its video quality will be improved.

In a video, Mosseri explains that the Instagram team prefers seeing good quality on the platform, and if engagement is low, they reduce the video quality.

He further elaborated that if the video trends on the app again, they change the video quality to higher.

Later the CEO commented on a Thread post: “It works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level. We bias to higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary threshold, but rather a sliding scale.”

All these changes are made so that the users get to see the best and trending content.

The CEO also thinks that the change in video quality is not much of a big deal as people mostly prefer the context of the video rather than its quality.