If you're wondering why some of your Instagram videos look blurry while others come out crisp, Instagram is doing that on purpose. According to a recent video AMA with Instagram head Adam Mosseri, the quality of your video changes depending on how many views it gets.
He explained, "In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can ... But 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. And then if it’s watched again a lot then we’ll re-render the higher quality video."
The platform devotes more resources to the "creators who drive more views." But, as The Verge pointed out, this approach is consistent with how Meta has done it before. It projected in 2021 that it wouldn't be able to keep up with the growing number of videos uploaded to its platform. So, their solution to conserve computing resources is to give the fresh uploads its fastest, most basic encoding. When it gets "sufficiently high watch time," it gets a more robust encoding pass. And when it goes viral or gets popular enough, the company applies its most advanced processing or what you'd consider the slowest, most computationally costly processing.