Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has addressed why some videos on the platform appear in different quality, shedding light on Instagram’s approach to video rendering based on engagement.

During a Q&A on Threads, Mosseri explained that video quality on Instagram can fluctuate depending on viewer behavior and connection speed.

Mosseri shared that Instagram prioritises high-quality encoding for videos that receive more views, especially shortly after being posted.

If a video isn’t watched as frequently over time, Instagram may reduce its resolution to save on processing power and storage. For videos that regain popularity, Instagram automatically increases the video quality to optimize the viewing experience.

“If something isn’t watched for a long time because the vast majority of views are in the beginning, we will move to a lower quality video,” said Mosseri.

“And if it’s watched again a lot we will re-render at a higher quality video… The goal is to show people the highest quality content that we can.”

The platform’s dynamic approach to video quality, Mosseri confirmed, operates at an aggregate rather than individual level, meaning that encoding adjustments aren’t tailored to each viewer but are instead influenced by overall engagement.

He also highlighted Instagram’s goal of balancing high-quality visuals with efficient storage, explaining that “creators who drive more views” receive priority in terms of CPU-intensive encoding.

This quality-tiering strategy has sparked mixed reactions among users, with some smaller creators expressing concerns that it favors more established accounts.

While Instagram’s system could reinforce existing popularity, Mosseri emphasised that engagement is primarily driven by content value rather than video quality alone. He suggested that videos focusing on relevance and originality tend to perform best, regardless of resolution.

Regardless of any macro-technical justification, the news has sparked fierce debate around the divvying of resources. Naturally, there’s concerns that Instagram’s approach will simply propogate the already popular while leaving smaller creators with a harder task in becoming visible.

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Yet, as Mosseri explained, the relationship between content quality and viewer engagement isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem. He stated that the success of a video is far more dependent on its content and the value it offers viewers than on whether it’s rendered in the highest possible quality.

“It doesn’t seem to matter much,” he added, noting that while quality can improve the user experience, it’s not the primary driver of engagement. However, given the sheer volume of content uploaded every day, this is a hard position to qualify and it seems more pertinent to consider if this algorithmic preference to “elite” content is in the spirit of what platform’s like Instagram want to achieve in terms of democratising content creation.