Instagram Lowers Video Quality of Stories and Reels That Do Not Fetch Views, Says Adam Mosseri

Instagram lowers the quality of videos that do not get a lot of views, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said on Friday. The social media platform's head executive revealed this during an ask-me-anything (AMA) session held on Instagram Stories. As per him, this applies to all video formats on the platform including Stories, longer videos, and Reels. The decision is taken to ensure that the videos watched by a lot of users and are getting a high volume of traffic are prioritised in terms of encoding.

Instagram Reduces Quality of Videos That Get Less Views

In a Threads post, a user posted the video where Mosseri answered a question about why older Stories which are saved as Highlights turn to a lower-quality version of the fresh upload. The Instagram head said that the platform has algorithms that automatically check older Stories and Reels which do not get many views and reduce their quality. This is done to reserve the computation resources for videos that are being watched by a large number of users.

This would explain why the Highlights and Reels of smaller creators appear slightly grainy when viewed after a certain period. Mosseri highlighted that quality reduction is applied after the interest cycle of a recent upload dies down. This could, in theory, take between a few days and a few weeks.

Some users raised concerns over this move, especially the transparency about such a decision. People also asked about the breakdown highlighting if a certain number of views is required to maintain the video quality.

Mosseri, replying to the Threads post, said, “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.”

When a user suggested that such a move makes it difficult for smaller creators to compete with larger creators, Mosseri explained that based on the analytics, users tend to interact with videos based on the quality of content rather than the quality of videos. He also claimed that the quality drop of the video is not significant enough to be a concern to users.