Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram

To ingest video and make it available for playback, we had the Instagram app upload the entire video file to the server once the client had finished recording it. Let’s start by defining upload latency for this article as the time it takes once the server has received all video bytes from the client, until the video is made “publishable” or available for viewing. This reduces latency in cases where the lower-quality versions took longer than the highest-quality version to process, and increases the success rate of video uploads, since we only depend on one version instead of all versions.

Source: instagram-engineering.com