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With the finish of the user profile page, the first prototype was finished. During the whole process of the creation of the
first prototype, a lot of the showcase strategy was used; I had talks with my company mentor from time to time, where he
would take a look at my progress. During these talks I showed him the finished parts, and what my next steps would be.
4.3.2 Research
I did quite some research during the progress of the first prototype. One of the questions I was researching was: “Is it
better to store the videos on the cloud or on a normal hosting?” For the video platform project, the company directors had
already decided it would be on a normal hosting. This was simply the most widely used form of hosting, and it was easier
for their future clients. Whenever a client wanted to have cloud hosting, then he/she was free to make the small changes to
the video platform. I however still needed to know what was the best choice of the two, and thus decided to research it
some more. At the same time I would be able to research another research question namely: “Is downloading or streaming
the videos the best way for a video platform?”
As usual I started out using the library strategy, I went online reading through articles. I also used the field strategy to
check inside the office, if people could answer my questions, and if they could justify their answers. I made notes for
myself, and went online again to check if the notes were correct compared to my findings on the web. In the next sub-
paragraph you can read more about the results of my findings.
Downloading a video would mean: the video will be downloaded to the hard drive. It is possible to start playing the video
even before it finishes the download. This would mean that every time the video would be downloaded to your hard drive;
now for the video platform this would not be a good idea, the whole point of the video platform would be to quickly watch
multiple videos. If every time the video had to be downloaded to the hard drive, it would not only be time consuming but
also unnecessary. Streaming however means that buffering occurs, such that there are small amounts of data downloaded
at a time.
Another question I wanted to research was: “How does mobile video resizing play a role?” With this question I needed to
know some more, thus I had 2 more subs questions, namely: “What is the best video size to use for different screens and
what screen size is mostly used?” and “What are the ways and methods of video resizing?”
Again with the library strategy I went online; mobile resizing plays a major role! According to Cisco’s Global Mobile Data
Traffic Forecast, over two thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2017 [8]. We are in a kind of mobile video
revolution. The market Is poised for an explosive growth ever since the arrival of video friendly smartphones, the adoption
of 3G/4G and the advent of YouTube and other video platforms that make watching mobile videos more enjoyable. Since
there is so much growth in mobile videos, there are also a lot of revenue opportunities. For this it is very important that the
videos are resized accordingly to the mobile devices.
What screen size is the best and mostly used is a harder question to answer. Mobile devices seem to grow more and more
in screen size every year. However, most devices stick to a screen size of 360x640; this is roughly the size of a Samsung
galaxy phone or one of the newer IPhones. Since most smartphones tend to stick to the size of 360x640, this is the most
widely used screen size.
There are different kinds of ways and methods of video resizing, but one method is more recent and sticks out: Bootstrap.
Bootstrap is a very nice tool to use for responsiveness and resizing to different screens. Because of the simplicity of
Bootstrap, it’s also the most used tool for resizing. Other resizing techniques would be to use custom CSS code, or use
different kinds of (paid) video players. Bootstrap is simple and easy to use, and actually resizes for all kinds of screen sizes.