It’s a fact, you have published a new video on Instagram, shot from your iPhone 16 Pro or your Pixel 9 Pro, with impeccable quality, but now, once on the platform, the video displays a very relative quality… or even frustrating if we compare it to that of other videos in circulation. On this side of Meta, we have just explained the why and the how, and the reason is simple, since the quality of a video will depend on the number of views it obtains.
Does your video appear degraded on Instagram? This is “normal”…
This is what the big boss of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, recently indicated. The latter indicated: “In general, we want to show the highest quality video possible… But if a video is not watched for a long time, because the vast majority of views are at the beginning, we will move to a lower quality video“. However, he specifies that if the video is watched again en masse, then it will be displayed again in better quality.
Remember that already in 2021, the company indicated that it would not be able to cope with the growing number of videos uploaded to the platform. Adam Mosseri specifies that the platform does this in order to “show users the highest quality content possible“.
To put it simply, Instagram therefore devotes more resources to videos from creators who generate the most views. Regardless of the time devoted to your latest video and the equipment used, if it does not quickly multiply views, its quality will automatically be degraded, to better highlight the content of other creators, regardless of their qualities or originality.
According to Meta, the degradation in question “is not huge“, and even though this approach disadvantages small creators, the American giant wants to clarify that Internet users interact with videos based on their content and not their quality. It must be admitted that the process can quickly become frustrating for a creator who is launching on the platform.
At Meta, we use the fastest and simplest coding for new uploads. When a video gets a high enough watch time, it benefits from editing, for better quality encoding. And if the latter becomes very popular, Meta then applies its most advanced treatment.
So this is why the most popular creators tend to produce the best-looking videos on Instagram.