Twitter’s poor video quality has been a long-running frustration for users on the platform, but on Friday, the company shared some potentially promising news: videos uploaded to the service will now “appear less pixelated for a better watching experience,” Twitter said in a tweet from its support account.
Twitter removed a pre-processing step in its video pipeline when you upload, the company tells The Verge, which could mean that the fidelity of a video is closer to the original version. But beyond that, we don’t know much about what’s changing, and it’s unclear why the company is being so vague about what should be a change worth celebrating from the rooftops.
App researcher Jane Manchun Wong uploaded a video to put the supposed improvements to the test, and the resulting video does appear to be less pixelated than it otherwise might have been. (The sound on this video is a little loud, so you might want to turn down your volume before you watch it.) It’s clearly not as crisp as a high-quality video that you might watch on YouTube or Twitch, though. And this upgrade only applies to newly-uploaded videos, so older videos won’t see the improvements.
That said, it’s promising to see that Twitter is putting some effort behind improving its video experience. And the upgrades may extend past video quality, as earlier this week, Wong’s research suggested that Twitter is also working on video playback speed options.