In the era of information explosion, video content has become a major force in internet communication. However, as the amount of video data explodes, how to effectively control costs while ensuring user experience has become a major challenge facing all video platforms.

Recently, the science popularization video blogger '影视飓风' released a video stating that video platforms excessively compress videos to save bandwidth costs, even dynamically adjusting the video clarity based on the number of views. This topic quickly sparked discussions in China and also triggered widespread debates across the ocean, as many foreigners have noticed the degradation of video quality.

Meta executive and head of social platforms Instagram and Threads, Adam Mosseri, publicly admitted that Instagram dynamically adjusts video quality based on the video's playback volume.

The more you watch, the higher the quality.

Instagram is one of the world's most popular social media platforms, with monthly active users exceeding 2 billion, and videos accounting for over 80% of its total traffic. The resources required for users to upload, encode, publish, and play videos are immense.

However, Instagram has adopted a strategy that is completely different from domestic video platforms. Domestic video platforms heavily compress the quality of popular videos. Some video websites will provide higher bitrates when there are fewer views on the video, and when the video becomes popular and the number of viewers increases, they will reduce the bitrate and adjust the format to save bandwidth costs. In contrast, on Instagram, the more views a video has, the higher its clarity becomes.

Mosseri stated that since most of the views are concentrated in the initial release period of a video, when a video goes unwatched for some time, Instagram compresses the video rendering quality. Once the video regains attention and the number of plays increases significantly, Instagram automatically renders the video into a higher quality version.

However, according to some user feedback, Instagram initially compressed videos posted for over 90 days, but quickly reduced it to 30 days, and now it has been reduced to one week.

Mosseri emphasized that Instagram is investing more resources in creator videos that can bring more views, in order to provide users with the highest quality content Instagram can offer.

"Only popular things look beautiful. Videos that are not trending only appear blurred." Some netizens complained like this. Mosseri explained that the video quality is not ultimately important. "The change in picture quality is not that great, people's interaction with the video is based on its content rather than its picture quality."

Ai chips will enable more high-quality videos.

In fact, compressing the video rendering quality does not reduce the original video quality uploaded to the platform server. The original video is simply transferred to a server optimized for storage. The compressed video is then streamed from the media server at a lower bit rate. Therefore, the original video itself has not changed.

Furthermore, Meta has developed a video processing AI chip called MSVP for this purpose. MSVP is designed to meet Meta's growing data processing needs for video on demand and real-time streaming, and Meta ultimately hopes to delegate most of the mature and stable video processing work to MSVP.

According to an article introducing the MSVP chip on Meta's official website in 2023, most of the viewing time on Meta's apps is generated by a relatively small proportion of videos. Therefore, the company must use different encodings to process them based on the popularity of the videos to optimize compression and computational efficiency. The company has developed a cost-benefit model to predict the viewing time of each uploaded video, and then control the encoding configuration that should be triggered.

Specifically, after a new video is uploaded to the platform, it will undergo the fastest and most basic low-quality encoding. Once the video gains a certain number of views, it will receive more powerful encoding to improve the picture quality. Once the video becomes popular enough, Meta will apply the most advanced encoding that requires more computational power to achieve high quality. The result, of course, is that the most popular creators often have the clearest videos.

The good news is that Meta company stated that MSVP has high compression efficiency, which can upgrade basic coding to advanced coding. With the support of MSVP, the computational complexity of advanced coding is significantly reduced, making it possible to provide advanced coding and high-quality video for more videos.