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Instagram Video Looks Bad? It’s Because of Poor Performance

By Laura Tucker
Instagram Videos Poor Quality Featured

You either worked real hard on a video that you’re hoping will go viral on Instagram, or you just can’t help but post the funny video with your friends from last night. But why does it look blurry? Instagram may have reduced the quality of your video because it wasn’t performing well within its base.

Instagram Head Explains Blurry Photos

Periodically, we all go through our social media posts, mostly to relive the memories. But some people have complained about their Instagram videos being blurry. Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri admitted that the blurry photos are intentional. They do that purposely if user videos aren’t performing up to their standards.

Mosseri was in an Ask Me Anything session on Threads and was asked by a user whether videos lose quality over time. His answer was probably not what they were expecting.

Instagram Videos Library
Image source: Unsplash

He said that they want Instagram to have the highest quality of videos on Instagram. That makes sense. No one can blame them for that. Yet, if they notice no one is watching an older video anymore, they will downgrade the video to lower quality. He noted that the majority of views are in the beginning, which is understandable.

Possibly to pacify users with this admission, Mosseri assured the user that choosing which videos to make blurry is not done on an individual viewer level – it’s done on an “aggregate level.”

Additionally, creators who bring in more views are given higher quality, with more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files. It’s done on a “sliding scale,” and not because a video failed to bring in a defined number of views.

FYI: new to Threads? Learn how to use the platform.

Is It Possible for a Video to Regain Popularity

What doesn’t seem to make sense is that if a video finds its popularity again and increases its views, Instagram will change it to a higher quality. How and why would it regain popularity if the quality has been decreased to a noticeable level?

Instagram Videos Uploading
Image source: Unsplash

One Instagram user brought this up to Mosseri in a comment, asking if this policy doesn’t make it more difficult for lesser-known creators to achieve success on the platform. He responded that “it doesn’t seem to matter much,” as the shift in quality isn’t much and that people interact with videos more because of the content rather than the video quality.

Mosseri furthered that idea by noting that quality seems to be more important to the person who creates and uploads the video to Instagram rather than the viewer, as the creator would be more likely to delete the video once it looks poor.

But again, it only looks poor because it slipped in popularity, and Instagram lessened the quality. So yes, it matters more to the creator, but the quality isn’t the creator’s fault if Instagram lowers it, so that argument fails. Nevertheless, creators are stuck with this rule. In addition to that, Instagram, along with Facebook, is one of the most invasive apps, so keep that in mind when browsing and creating videos.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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