Ed-Tech: Delivering High Quality Video at Scale to Millions

The Indian EdTech has received a massive uptick in consumption due to a number of reasons, such as the penetration of in-expensive mobile phones and data plans in Tier-2 & 3 cities, diversification from purely-K12 classes into up-skilling or niche education (fitness, drawing, painting, etc.), and, of course, the COVID pandemic that forced the entire world to go online!

With several EdTech unicorns in India today, it is a testimony to the talent, technology, and vision of these companies who chose a digital path for educating and up-skilling the nation.

Inside an EdTech Company’s Tech Stack

After speaking to several ed-tech companies and understanding their tech stack, we see that they typically

• Have several thousand educational videos of 45 mins to 1.5 hours in length
• Have upwards of 50K — 60K students enrolled in their service.
• Deliver close to 2 hours of video for every active subscriber each day!
• Have a significant user-base from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in India apart from the Tier-1 and Metros.

Considering all of this, it is evident that ed-tech companies in India are running at a scale that rivals several Tier-1 OTT companies!

With thousands of active users watching multiple hours of content daily, this is a dream for a content delivery company!

But … is it entirely a dream, or are there bits and pieces of nightmares sprinkled here and there?

Let’s take a look at some of the problems that ed-tech platforms face while building and maintaining a large-scale video delivery system -

High Operational Complexity

• Enterprises have to integrate 3–4 different technology vendors to build a video app. Interoperability is a nightmare!

High Operational Costs

• Building and scaling video delivery infrastructure is a costly affair where most of the costs come from transcoding, storage, and CDN infrastructure and the managed services around these.

Complex Billing from different vendors

• Using multiple vendors invites multiple bills that don’t correlate with each other and can leave you in the dark.
• This makes it difficult for companies to tie their growth with their technology costs.

Poor QoE

• Hard to achieve high quality, buffer-free streaming, quick start-up times, and seamless delivery into the regions poorly served by CDN PoPs.
• Solving these problems requires complex technical interventions.

Lack of Effective Distribution

• After investing in content and technology, enterprises are left with little funds for marketing and distribution.

So, what does an ed-tech company do when they face these problems as they scale?

Confusing multi-vendor integrations and escalating operational costs can kill a business.

How can Airtel IQ Video help?

Airtel’s IQ Video brings in the latest in video transcoding and streaming technology at a great price to help ed-tech companies deliver their content in the best possible way.

With our easy-to-use solution, you can manage and deliver all of your Live and VoD content with just a few clicks of your mouse.

With Airtel IQ Video’s Single Vendor Approach, you can rest assured that all your technical problems will be solved and handled with the utmost care and with the latest technological advances.

We will use the latest in

• Transcoding technology
  - To reduce the size of your videos by 20–30%
  - To optimize your files for mobile consumption in regions with poor internet connectivity.
• Packaging and DRM,
• CDN-based streaming for both VoD and Live, and provide
• Hybrid monetization policies (Ads and Subscriptions) to drive revenue.

You also have access to data to track how your videos are being consumed and streamed across the country on a per-asset level.

In addition to streaming your videos securely and at scale, Airtel IQ Video can also help you with

• Live Streaming your classes to your audience along with automatic conversion to VOD
• Monetization using Ads and Subscriptions
• Subtitle delivery
• Multi-audio (single video with multiple languages files) streaming
• Metadata ingest, and delivery (specific to ed-tech)

If you are in the ed-tech industry and would like to know more, then the Airtel IQ Video team will be glad to set up a 30 min deep-dive to understand your needs, aspirations, and pain points and figure out how Airtel can partner and contribute to your success.

Please fill up this form (https://forms.gle/hs42y8JNATDfGEkL8), and we’ll get in touch with you