Mark Z wants to up-convert all the media uploaded into high resolution media. What would you do?

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Mark Z wants to up-convert all the media uploaded into high resolution media. What would you do?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Ruwan Budhagoda · Answer 1 · 2020-04-11T05:15:10+0000

Reason for the ask:

Mark must be thinking of a way to provide a richer experience for the user by providing higher resolution images and video and possibly going after competitors such as google where users have larger storage capacity. Possibly this might be the first step towards providing such experience towards that solution.

Now let discuss the tradeoffs of supporting the higher resolution images. Higher resolution media could reach only a small amount of users due to network, higher-end phone support needs, etc while lower resolution media could reach a larger amount of users where network and phone capabilities are less. Also, higher resolution media could drive more users to spend more time in site comparing to lower resolution media supported platforms. One thing also to keep in mind is possible to effect higher resolution content might having on other features within the platform.

I believe one of the core goals to set for this question would be time spent on site (overall). Therefore measuring for this matric will provide a clear direction. When we consider time on site the matric value will be less for both higher and lower resolution media. Higher-resolution due to less user being able to access content vs lower resolution users would be disappointed with the image quality and not engaging.

Therefore I would recommend to Mark, running an A/B test and optimize for the best resolution (a resolution which doesn't compromise users and also would be able to reach to a larger number of users). We could possibly optimize the test by selecting different weights for A/B test concentration on different Geo's, phone platforms, OSs and ISPs to figure what is the optimized resolution for a specific group. So we could propose a personalized resolution for media.

Anirudh Kasturi · Answer 2 · 2020-04-07T02:30:25+0000

Clarifying questions:

What are the goals of this feature?

Improve user experience of the the users viewing content with high resolution media
Improve user engagement by encouraging users to upload more media
Attract new users? Customer acquisition
Make facebook a one stop solution to upload media and store them as high resolution media?
Would it be for all videos or would it be Revenue driven where users get to use this feature at a cost based on how much of their content (Free upto 250GB) they want to be stored as high resolution.

What are the problems we are trying to solve:

1. Improve and normalize the quality of the media on facebook uploaded by various users from various regions with various qualities of videos.

2. Give the users an opportunity to express themselves equally by helping convert ther media to high resolution regardless of their devices or demographics or internet connectivity.

3. Can be a great feature for people to collaborate and make high resolution content together from different regions or demographics.

What are the metrics that would determine the success?

DAU, MAU
CTR to upload content (photos/videos/Live)
Customer acquisition rate, % increase in the new user sign ups
User engagement: Views, Likes, Shares and comments after watching the content
Customer retention rate
ROI, if the feature is monetized based on ads or the feature itself by charging users for more than a certain amount of content to be converted to high resolution
CTR of ads
% of users paying for the feature for more than a certain amount of data uploads (Say > 250GB).

Trade-offs:

#1 The users will have to wait for a bit after the upload for the content to be converted to high resolution and becoe depending on the size of the content.

#2 Users with a bad network connectivity will not be able to view/observe slowness while trying to view the high resolution media

#3 If we have to address the #2 then we need to let the user choose to view the media in low resolution which adds up to the storage . We already need a large storage for storing high resolution media.

I am going to prepare a strong business case as well with all the above metrics and present the case to the executives.