 I'm coming all of you to this wonderful panel today. The topic is enhancing the user experience in online education through quality digital content and delivery. And I have a very eclectic, huge list of panelists with me today. I'm so fortunate to be listening to all of you. I'll just introduce quickly one by one. I have Pajwal Sinha, co-founder, Amigos. We have Poonam Singh Jambal, director, Extra Marks Education India Private Limited. Karanveer Singh, founder and MD, Parikshaw. I have with me Kush Bhejal, founder and CEO, Neo Stencil. Udit Sahni, CEO, MyPath.in. Anuj Kumar, CTO, Adda, 24-7. Arjun Mohan, CEO, India, Upgrad. Gaurav Goyal, CEO, top rankers. Phulkit Jain, co-founder and product head, Vedantu. Gomti Damodaran, director, Aha Guru. Balaji Sampath, founder, Aha Guru. Riya Mehta, product manager, digital content leader. Ahmer Nadim, MD, 13 education. I3 education. I'm sorry, sorry, I3 education, my bad. Ashwin Rao, sales director, India, Limelight Networks and will be joined by Charles O'Hissier, Mr. Kross, senior product marketing manager, Limelight Networks. I welcome all of you to this discussion today. And as you know, e-learning has, of course, it's always been important for the education leaders and the entire community, but in COVID, it has specifically got a certain prominence now. I think it has also enabled a seamless experience when the schools were closed. It was e-learning that came to the rescue. It's becoming mainstream. And as we move forward, I think policy makers are taking a serious look at the future of e-learning. So this is broadly what we'll be discussing and we have all the thought leaders here. We have a certain flow to this panel. I would be beginning, we will begin with a short keynote, I would call it, by Mr. Charles Kross of Limelight Networks. We would start with it and then we go to the question. I welcome you, Mr. Kross, to start the discussion with your keynote. Okay, okay. Good day, everyone. Let me just share my screen. It's still not. So, folks, while Charles is working with the, with Exchange for Media in terms of organizing the video, I just wanted to kind of break the awkward silence here. I'll just say hi to everyone. It's a pleasure having you all. You're obviously esteemed leaders with your own backyards. Limelight, just to give you a quick introduction and Charles can talk a lot about it in detail. Myself, I'm more of an eavesdropper on this call and the guy who's going to sit silently and kind of listen to all the industry feedback, the product feedback about how you guys are enabling your students, your consumers in terms of making the learning experience better. And then we can open that up to the presentation with that. I think Charles is ready right now. So I just wanted to say hi. Welcome everyone to my side as well. And I look forward to talking to all of you. I'm still getting the message host has disabled screen sharing. Okay, so it's, well, can we start in the meantime, you know, with some points that you have while the tech guy is starting here? Sure, so I'm going to just put the screen in front of me and I'll just start talking and let me know when I can share. So yeah, so one of the things I want to talk about is every year, multiple times a year, Limelight does surveys of consumers about their habits with watching video and generally digital lifestyles. And this spring we decided to make a change in what we do. So we took the survey and we made it about the pandemic and about the new habits. And we discovered a lot of interesting things about the different types of uses of video, the big increases in demand, certainly for online education. And I'm going to use a sort of a broad definition of online learning. It's not just schools and universities, but it's extended to many, many different activities that people use. Certainly a massive switch to working at home and learning is involved now. Such things as workout classes, people learning to play a musical instrument or improving their hobbies and so forth. We haven't released a survey publicly, not for another week, but I was allowed to share just some data on specific to India that I'll share. And it just sort of a little bit of a teaser so that when the full report comes out, you want to read it. But India is always an outlier when we do these 10 countries survey. So we survey countries in Asia Pacific, North and South America, Europe and so forth. And people in India tend to use video more than people in any other countries. So for example, just video-based platform. So 80% of the consumers that we surveyed in India said that they expect a big increase in the use of video platforms, not only now, but even after the pandemic abates that they'll continue to do that. 93% of them are actually already using learning of all sorts, taking the language class, musical instrument, school children. So that's practically everybody in the population. And things like online fitness, 82% of people who generally take either exercise classes and maybe go to a gym now, we're doing that online. So before we go further, what I want to do is talk about a couple of case studies from countries in India. So one is a new learning company, Topper. They're in Mumbai, and they offer a comprehensive after-school learning program for K through 12 students. So they currently have two and a half million student users who are using their platform for taking exams and learning. And so the challenges they have were, one is they had a rapid growth to get to two and a half million students, and they have a total of 8,000 video classes in their library. And they want to improve the user experience. So users use any kind of device, mobile devices, tablets, PCs, and they want to make sure they can have a great user experience on all of them. And they want to deliver videos as fast as possible. So when someone goes online and requests a video, it's delivered quickly. So the solution they use is, they're using Limelight's content delivery service. So this is the basic CDN service to deliver content from any source to any place in the world. And also something that the CDN has is storage. So the 8,000 different lesson videos are stored in CDN storage. And the reason they do that is for very fast access. So when somebody requests a video, the request doesn't have to go to the topper platform. It's delivered directly out of the CDN. And so- Can you show the screen now? I can share the screen? Oh, that's great. Let me try that. Beautiful. Okay, now does everybody see the screen? Yes, yes. Okay. So the benefits for, in fact, let me put it into slide show mode. Here we go. So the results that they have is now they're able to upload store and deliver these 8,000 videos without any rebuffering. They come up fast because they're stored in origin storage and they have very responsive customer support. So we have 24 by seven, 365 help. Another one, this is not in India. This is a French company, Coach Guitar. Coach Guitar, Coach Guitar. So a different type of- Different type of music. I think there's some music. Now we're getting a feedback. No, it's fine, it's fine. You can start now. It's okay? Yeah, it's okay. Okay, okay. So this is music lessons. Again, another popular thing that's come up. So this is learning to play guitar online. And again, they had similar growth problems. Suddenly, you know, 40,000 downloads per day. They're expanding into new markets and they need storage for the library. So pretty similar to using content delivery and storage. Now they have very good user experience. The videos come up fast. You know, lots of good technical support. So it's, you know, two good examples of a Kaipan e-learning that's going on. So what we've seen, you know, of the impact, one thing is time has shifted. The times people watch video and use it, different time times before, during the day. I just want to interrupt. Just a little thing with the audio. It's a little bit of fear. Okay, now? Yes, sounds better. Okay, yes. Yeah, so it's feedback loop. So one of the things happened is traffic patterns have changed and it's unpredictable. So as a global network, we're seeing very new behaviors and demands around the world in different regions for when people want to watch video. And generally the total amount has increased almost 50% around the world everywhere. So, so far, global networks have done a good job. I am really sorry to interrupt again. Can I request everyone to mute their microphones? I think that is the reason. Then only we could be able to hear, you know, Mr. Crosswell. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, if you want to ask questions, you can unmute. But if everybody can use. Yes, yes, I think that is the thing. Yes, sir, please. Okay, thank you. So, and also sometimes there's been demands for reducing the streaming bit rates to, you know, take the load off the networks and make sure that, you know, there's some capacity there in case there's like emergency news updates and so forth. So that's been a challenge for some of the networks to adapt to all this. So just a little bit about limelight. You know, what we do, it's basically for basic businesses is the biggest is on-demand and live video. The vast majority of the traffic and our revenue comes from video. In fact, we're really known as the video CDN built a network that's often used for this. But also there's a good business in software file downloads. So if you think about devices and the big software updates for like an iPhone or one of the big things now is big video games that people play online, that's become a big means of distraction for people. The file sizes of these are growing to almost be 200 gigabytes now. And when lots of people want to download those, that's a big strain. And then web content for the objects on a website and then things, something new is edge compute. So the ability to have customized edge compute resources for you. So why are we different? There's a lot of CDNs. One is we have a global private network. We do not use the internet. Like most CDNs do, we have private fiber. So this enables us to have control over how we route traffic. So for video, we have a quality of service enabled so we route our traffic through high priority queues and around congestion points. And all our servers are big, powerful new servers with all solid state drives, which is important for video, so it's fast and lots of capacities. So we handle 4K and 8K videos coming soon next, mostly next year. So some of the challenges we have is how do you add capacity? So there's several ways to do it. One is increase the number of pops to cover more locations and other is increase the number of links to connect them and also add capacity to each pop. And then being intelligently utilized in the infrastructure. So things like dynamic load balancing to add redundancies to use multiple paths. We use what we call cap checks when we do big live events. We make sure we have paths with a lot of bandwidth linked up and ready to go so we can take really high demands on this. We can serve streams from multiple regions so we spread the load out. And the most important thing is network engineers in the network operating center are there for every live event, managing the traffic, looking at the network and doing any engineering they need to do during the whole event to make sure it's running properly. So I just wanna show a few typical workflows. This is the main on-demand and live workflow. So whether you're doing a live or on-demand, it's very simple. We just ingest either RTMP or MP4 streams from the content owners. We do everything automatic in the network in terms of transcoding, transmuxing to get them to the correct format for any device. This is working with device detection. So whether you have a tablet or a laptop or a PC or a game console, anything you're watching video on, from the requests, we know exactly what the device is, what format the video has to be in. We know about the screen size. So all this formatting is that HLS is a dash and what the screen resolution is. It's all taking care of automatically and that's a typical workflow. The other is some of the very large companies like Amazon or Hulu, these very big Netflix, they do their own transcoding and transmuxing and they just deliver packaged video to us for distribution. And this is the content delivery. So we bypass the transcoding and transmuxing in the CDN and we just basically use our network to deliver to their audience anywhere in the world and they wanna do the transcoding themselves. So for on-demand, I'll just build this slide out. So typically you'll bring MP4 in at a high bit rate and what we'll do is we'll transcode that down to the different bit rates that you need for 1080p or 720 and in the CDN delivery, depending on the request. So you may have a laptop requesting a four meg dash stream and we'll send that or it could be a streaming device like a Roku that wants 720p, 2.4 meg. So depending on the device, what the bandwidth is that they want and what the format is, all that will be taken care of by the CDN. Sorry, your voice is the... Charles, you're fading away. My voice is fading away. Maybe I'll talk better if I talk louder. Okay, okay. So just the same thing again with packaging. So we accept the videos from the server, the origin server. We do the packaging and then we deliver out. For live traffic, it's a very similar workflow except now we're receiving RTMP source. So that's streamed to us. We transcode it to the different bit rates that the devices require and then the CDN delivers the proper bit rate from the device detection out to each. So the very simple workflows, they take these complex tasks and offload that into functionality in the CDN network to make it easier for content owners to distribute the video. I always have to talk about security when you're talking about video. So a lot of times if you license content, you need to protect it against stuff. So you have digital rights management or DRM. That's part of it. You access control. So sometimes you wanna control by region who can receive it. Some licensed traffic may have rights that restrict the regions that can receive it. So use geolocation based on the IP address to control that. Things like HTTPS, so globally, so you encrypt the video traffic when you send it. And then just on the infrastructure, you wanna have DDoS attack protection and web application firewall protection so that the website's always available. So all of these services we're talking about are all part of what's in the CDN that can be used when you deliver the video. Or web application firewall. This is very critical because what DDoS attack are trying to shut down access to the network. WAP packs are going after like personal data, either to steal consumers private information, credit card numbers, things like that. And so you need to have protection against that. These are combined with bot management. So you know, good bots and bad bots. So the idea is detection nodes through the network to detect and block these attacks fast so that there's no attacks, but to do it in a way that does not impact performance. So we have a way of looking at the traffic without impacting the performance by having a lot of detection nodes in the network. And you wanna do protection across all channels. So it's not just the websites, but you wanna protect mobile applications and you wanna protect the API. So these services are working across all these channels. A bot detection, you know, there's good bots and bad bots. We all know that the internet wouldn't work without good bots to do the searching and scanning and finding out how to locate content. And the Google does this all the time so that it can make an index of where everything is located for you and those are all good bots. Use it to look to measure performance of your network and how your website's operating. But there's also bad bots that are getting very sophisticated. They're very human like in the way they spoof mouse movements and so forth. So they're harder to detect and they're the ones that are trying to get in to steal private data and so forth or involve money transfers and try to do that kind of stuff. So the bot detection capabilities really have to include what we call these new fourth generation human like bots and detect them. So all of these services are available in the security suite that we have. And just briefly, just quickly some customers I try to put up customers from around the world that are well known. So your voice is fading away, sorry, yeah. Excuse me? Your voice is a little fading away again, sorry. Oh, feeding in. Okay, well, this is the last slide now. I didn't want to take too much time going through this. I want to get to the important stuff which is the discussions of the topic of the day. So I'm going to stop sharing. So we're going to get back on the screen here. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for this wonderful- Thank you so much. On any of that. Thank you. This has been a good discussion for you sir. Thank you. Thank you for this presentation and we'll just get into discussion. Now I will start with you coach. Can I, I'll just, yeah. So we're talking about the impact of COVID and on e-learning and much has been already spoken about that it has made a new normal, new mainstream. But from your personal experience as you have observed what has been the large takeaway for e-learning players from the COVID? Sure. So, I mean, we have seen students having more number of queries coming in for online course that is definitely there. And it's not only just all the content providers whether it's individual teachers or test prep institutions or colleges or schools. So it's just like both ends of different periphery that is the content providers and the content consumers. Both, I mean, both of them are now looking to go online in some of the other way. And this is the fast changing environment wherein everybody is looking to consume and get on with it as soon as possible. On the supplier side, it has become a necessity now because if they don't go online, the other player will go online and then they're going to lose out to their competitors. So that's something that has become a new normal as we all understand. And of course, with all these things, lot more content is going to be created online. And when lot more content is created, the problem of plenty occurs. So that's somewhere the curation is going to matter in the future. Of course, and on the supplier side, the teachers and the institutions will now be teaching online for the first time. So there, of course, is going to be a training. They might have to undergo or they will improve over the time. So those are the few initial challenges that the suppliers, the content providers are going to face initially. On the student side, I'm sure Limelight is doing a great work and in terms of optimizing the bandwidth at their end because until the time the internet infrastructure is great, we do need, the industry do need solutions like Limelight wherein bandwidth is not an issue while consuming the content. Right. Uddit, if I have to ask you the same question, what would you say? First of all, I think obviously the new normal has shifted. If I look back the initial period of say March and April, all of us were fighting for one thing to bring all the classes online. One thing has been defined. Recorded videos over live sessions, this debate. So live sessions by live tutors has clearly been the winner. Because, you know, education is a very different kind of an animal. It too much depends upon the grade of student which you are teaching to. So maybe senior students can see videos and can learn the guitar lessons and all of that. However, children going to schools, you have to have a teacher hand holding the students. So the recorded lessons practically will be helpful only if I can see as a student the recording of the session I attended to. Secondly, I think all the online companies, they crack the code of how to pitch online. So I think now everyone are into the same well. We have passed that phase. But now what remains is the real experience. See, there are two aspects of it. One is technological aspect, one is academic aspect. When we talk about technology, I think the speed, the experience, the seamlessness and all of this comes together and, you know, so for example, now we are having our admission tests online. We are counseling online. We are delivering the courseware online, including the live classes. We're having the assessments online, you know. All of that has suddenly come up. But there is a, I think what the larger thing I always miss in all these discussions around education is the core focus on academics. That is not changing. For example, I can give you three quick examples of how online classes are not as good as the classroom, though I'm an online player, but I'm still saying this because then I will give the solutions as well. You see, we all have seen our children in our home getting tutored online with the help of various tools, with their school teachers. But what we observed also was all of their videos were off. They were put to mute so that they cannot create requests in the classroom. So how do students lose that out? I've also seen a lot of students now move away from the screens because teacher cannot watch them. That's the problem to solve. And obviously that's a bandwidth issue. The second thing is their mics were also put to off. So now you have to understand the way education is designed, the curricula. It is always dependent upon, so these are different nodes. One is dependent on the other. So unless a student can raise their hand in the classroom and ask a question, he is not going to understand the real depth of it. The other thing I would say is missing greatly, which can never probably happen unless we really bring down the student to teacher ratio is the respect that a teacher could command in the classroom. So a lot of students also study. They do well because there's a social pressure because I hated chemistry in my school time, but I was studying chemistry just so hard only because my chemistry teacher was my best teacher. She just had so much confidence in me. So all of that gets missing because then a teacher at a distance who I do not connect to personally, I do not river that. So in our Indian system, we river our gurus, right? So that goes missing. And the last thing is the efficacy of the peer group. So we are currently catering to, say J market, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th. So, and we create, end up getting a lot of top rankers in India. What we also heard from them is their peer group is extremely, extremely important to them, extremely important for the kind of competition, that positive competition that it creates. So now, if I'm not connecting to, connected to my students, my fellow students, that also goes missing. So all of these are negative parts of learning online. However, the first principle remains the same. And I think we should all focus on that. And what is that? We have to really understand to crack this. We have to understand how a student consumes knowledge, consumes information, right? So we have to have goal setting sessions for them. You have to have a student bring up in a way wherein he's able to identify a goal for himself. Then we have to personalize his path. Right. And that cannot happen without analytics. Right. So I'll come to it. I'll come to it. Sorry. This time I'll come to it. I have a separate question on it. I want to go to Poonam Singh and ask her that how much do you agree with what Uddit has said? Virtual gurus, I mean, we have, do we kind of, can we recreate the same atmosphere that the school gives us? I mean, what are your learnings from the COVID experience? So hi, everybody. I would first, before starting, would like to tell you that we've been serving the K-12 market for the last 15 years. And we have 9 million students already studying online with us, around the 6 million in the schools. And there was a lot of adoption and a lot of learning from us in the process of serving that population. As a result, when we came, we were hit by COVID, our response was sharper. And we knew what to expect in terms of serving the audience. We realized that one single common factor that made the whole process seamless was the quality learning content that they were already consuming. And then they just seamlessly access the same content online through the apps and from the teaching platform. So the main topic of today's discussion really, which is the new learning that all of us in the COVID environment have to realize, is that the learning content is going to be the core of everything and will also bring value to the teacher and also will bring value to the child. How we consume digital learning resources is what is going to change. I'll give you an example. When we are in the classroom, the teacher is using digital learning content through the smart class solution, right? And within that, it is not anymore just an entertainment product. It is to do with leveraging the best technologies and experience, 2D, 3D, AI, et cetera, that she knows that she's created a hierarchy of learning. One is to get just a video and share with the child, other is to embed it with pedagogy. And she is using that in the classroom. And the student is familiar with her using that in the classroom. Now, the moment she moves online, in our online classroom, she's using the similar tools to reach out to the child. And it is embedded with the basic principles of how a child learns. So you can learn it through animation, a lecture by the teacher, or you can learn from flow charts. All those solutions are available to the child. What is now going to change? One is most, even in a smart class environment, it was instruction-led model. But when you go online, the fatigue of instruction-led model is sexy. When you have 40 tiles of students, you can't pay attention to any child, then how do you give personalized attention to the child? Then within the teaching platform, other than embedding all the learning solutions on. Shall we go to Karanveer with the same question that what have been your learnings from the COVID? And as others have pointed out, they have said that there are certain things which cannot be recreated and we need to fill those gaps. What are your views on that? Yes, I can. I'm sorry, my microphone was on mute. So thank you, thank you for having me here. Hello everyone, I'm Karan Singh. I am the founder of Parishya. So we cater to a very, very different market. Parishya is primarily meant for Bharat. We have an accurate nature and today we serve over 2.5 million users across 11 states and six languages. What we have experienced is that generally, if you look at Bharat population and if you look at the student as well as the education institutions there, most of them, they are run by the traditional mindsets. Whether it is students or whether it is teachers, they were averse to adopting technology. But suddenly what has happened is because of the COVID, you know all the schools, coaching institutes, everything is shut. And whether it is the coaching institute owners or whether it is, what I mean by coaching institute owners is it is for Charles. So Charles, we have private tutors here in India who will help you prepare for these exams. So whether it is these education institutions or whether it is the student, suddenly they were forced to adopt technology. And once they were forced to adopt technology, they realized that a better or maybe at-par experience can be delivered with the help of technology. So the kind of experience Udit was talking about, probably this is more prevalent in the urban India where you have a student-teacher ratio. But if you look at the rural India, which is Bharat, there is no concept of student-teacher ratio there. In one class, you'll find 500 people sitting there. There are no desks, only chairs. You know, you have to keep your notebook on your lap and you keep taking down notes. In 500 students, I doubt anybody can have the courage to raise their hand and say, you know, I did not understand this. So that kind of interactive was missing there. What we have experience is that suddenly because technology also offers you this anonymity, you know, you can be anywhere, nobody's gonna laugh at you. You can still raise your hand and you can ask a question. So we have seen people hooking on to the platform now and the education institutions also realizing that a much better experience or at-par experience can be delivered maybe one-fourth or one-fifth of the price. Was I the only one who stepped out? We lost the connection in between, but I will... So I started, yes, with the next question, but I'll come back to you. I'll come back. Yes, so our learning has been very, very different. Our learning is very positive in the sense that the entire landscape, whether it is the students or whether it is the teachers or the education institutions, all of them are openly adopting technology now. Right, right. I wanna come to you, Anuja. Yes, Anuja, I want to come to you. Okay, I thought I'll just complete my thought because it got stuck. Okay, okay, okay. So I just wanted to just conclude with the thing that the connective factor would be a learning content, really. And now we have to start looking at learning content as a self-learning tool instead of the school books because school books are actually going to get redundant. And the learning content would be in terms of digital solutions, et cetera, that the child learns himself and uses the teacher interaction more like a tutorial rather than an instruction model. And then for that, I think it's very critical for the content quality to be A plus and for it to leverage best technologies and be accessed by the best technology, you're all the platforms. It should be platform agnostic, hardware agnostic for a good experience to be there. Right. Adi, one quick learning in 40 minutes that I have is that we need great connectivity and delivery mechanisms as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very critical part of this. 100. Great content, yes. I wanna come to you, Anuja, and ask you that e-learning, when it comes to e-learning, do you think this search was unexpected and how did you meet the demand? There was no time to think around. It was like so quick a strategy needed. How did you adjust to it and kind of brought out the content and reached out to all the people? Hi, hi, everyone. So I'm representing Adi here. So I think very great question here. So for technology, actually, and I think at this particular time, what happened is that we saw, everybody saw that search and kind of a number of people who are coming online and getting the education or looking for the education content, right? So I think important part is that for the technology, everything needs to be ready, right? You cannot think of that someday. You would be like getting the traffic and then you'll be preparing yourself for this kind of a situation, right? So adoption of technology is inevitable, right? And everybody has to actually accept it or let's suppose get it as soon as, or it could be pushed to them as well. So this pandemic has pushed it to the people, right? But if you talk about the online digital players, they have to be kind of ready with the scalability, with the technology platforms, all the platform, all the infrastructure, which could actually cater to this kind of a situation. So I would say that being ready is the very important part to actually overcome a problem which you could see at this kind of a situation. Yeah, that is a reason within a month, surprisingly, we could onboard 2 million children within a month. And that readiness wasn't there, scalability wouldn't have been possible. So that's great. Absolutely, absolutely. I want to go to Arjun with the same question that, there was a little time to strategize and adjust and all of that. And yet, eLearning has become so effective, such a great alternative. What have been your learnings at Upgrad if you could tell us? Yeah, so I moved from K12 into higher ed, bang in the middle of the lockdown. So I joined Upgrad on first table and I've been working from home ever since then. Yeah, what's interesting, I mean, I'm sure that none of us, I mean, we have been facing a lot of challenges throughout our life, especially in the last five, 10 years, you had demonetization, you had the whole NBFC crisis, every time the market gets affected, some of the other things. But this has been, I would say, unprecedented. So many changes, not only on the demand side, but also on the supply side. Like nobody knew what will happen, every day is a new one. So first and foremost thing is that, see, typically how do you solve a problem? You solve a problem by looking at the data, right? You look at what happened past year this time, you look at what happened, past quarter this time. Problem today is there is no history to check. Every day is new. So the only thing you can do is what is happening now? What happened two hours ago? How is the consumer behavior changing? So that's the first and foremost thing. It's been only about now, what is the consumer doing? So very simple, you keep the consumer at the center of your universe. Your product, your strategy, your delivery, your marketing, everything should be around that person on what is current needs is, what is fears are, what is aspiration are, so on and so forth. So I mean, I don't need to tell this, but every attack company in the country may be K-12, higher ed, whatever it is, saw a five to six times growth in traffic everywhere. And everyone knew this was an opportunity. A lot of insiders were there who never really believed in online. It was an opportunity to really show them. People who had confidence in their product, they're told that, okay, fine, why don't you check out my product for free? Because I have the confidence that you would love the product and then you will come on board today or someday. At least I've given you to see. So this is what a, literally everyone did. Somebody who had a good product was able to retain, others we are seeing what is happening today. So what typically has been happening, and I'm not speaking for upgrade, I'm speaking for a complete, at five to six times, that the top of the funnel has gone up, upper funnel having like the traffic has gone up, but the revenue is where the problem is, right? Finally, all of us survive on that revenue part. So for that, what I have observed, and this is what most of the people have told me also, is that the customer sales cycle, the time taken by a customer to make a decision has really gone up. The customer is still thinking, okay, should I do it? This is uncertain. I don't know what will happen to my job. So what I'm talking about. So the organizations where I'm seeing, who is really completing the loop, are the ones who is just not able to take advantage of that traffic, but also having the right infrastructure and products to bring that conversion. So like the way, I mean, Uddit said, for his market, his realization has been that that needle mover is a life. In case of my market, I have been very clear that I will give these things and ensure that the people are engaged. See, whatever said and done, education is a business if I can use it, which always works. When people are doing well, they're ambitious, they want to do more and go up in life. When they are in trouble, they are looking at education to protect themselves from the issue which will come. So it has been completely about how well you have been able to do your sales and market it out to them by understanding their competence or their fears in their mind. So it has helped a lot that well-trained sales team, a sales team which was able to rigorously push forward or the marketing muscle which never got able to pivot out and change things very soon. All those things are really up. So my guess is that on the other side of the pandemic also, I don't really see ATEC emerging out as every company in ATEC emerging out. I would say that only a few companies who had the right product, the right marketing and the right sales team to come out successful. But it's been pretty interesting. And I think the same was being told by Karan, right? His market is very different. He found, and he was having a problem which he was solving. So I mean, in my understanding, in last one and a half months, what I've understood is that you just keep the customer at the center of your universe. Perfect. If you're able to make decisions after listening to him, that's all that matters. Gaurav, I want to come to you with this one of the points that do you think... I mean, the feeling among the ATEC players is that we're ahead of the time and they have the satisfaction right now that look, we always felt like that. Is that feeling also there apart from the learning that I want to know? What are that? Big time. Yeah, so if I can kind of place it this way. So I think this pandemic has more emerged like a lead magnet, which is like you're getting a lot of leads in. And like if you see the two journeys of a candidate, a pre-purchase journey and a post-purchase journey. So now you are in as a company you have to really focus on both of them. So I think it has really helped in a pre-purchase journey where you have a lead magnet now. And the second step generally is like you have a trip fire where you want a student to make a small transaction with you. And I think as Arjun rightly mentioned that yes, there is the different people are facing different stuff. For some, there's a better convergence. For some, the converges are not still good. And I think one very good realization which has happened is I think if this kind of a traffic is coming and what you can do with a post-purchase journey. So because education is not a referral market. Like if you see all large brick and mortar businesses like all Coachings in because we have a very different business model. We are an online coaching marketplace. We work with about 1000 plus institutes. We have about 4.2 million students on the platform. So we largely get all our learnings from offline institutes. We work with them and try to transform everything online, whatever they're doing. Like one of the things which has really worked well for us and we have kind of really taken six, seven fuels into that side is adding a secondary teacher as part of a class. So we had a primary teacher who's teaching which is a style teacher generally and everybody wants to get taught from them. Now what happens? So you can do personalization in two ways. Either your tech can do it or you can do it through a secondary teacher. We have taken a secondary teacher approach because tech is still evolving. You are still learning what has to get personalized because there are a lot of exams. We serve right now about 150 exams. So and a lot of things works work very differently for each of those. So I think a massive shit, a good lead magnet. We are now consuming about 400 terabytes of data monthly. Millions of users are coming in. Yeah, but I think it's time now to work on a post-purchase journey. And I think that will take all of us ahead. Right. Balaji, I want to come to you with the next question. I mean, the question is the same. I want to understand from you basically. Key learnings for your company from this pandemic. What were the key takeaways from this? I think probably going with what Gaurav was saying. The post-purchase journey is basically what we had been focusing a lot on. I mean, we decided not to go in for a drawing in the free thing because I know that everybody is doing that also. So we decided that we won't be offering too many of these free things to lure people in. Rather focus on the sales part directly because then you're talking about students who are serious about taking the course. Because otherwise a lot of people are also in the exploratory mode. In fact, one of the things that I'm worried about, I mean, probably a little bit of a twist from the general, there is a sense that online has now become a mainstream way of thinking. But there is also a small danger that too many people who are not ready for online have jumped into online in a big way. I mean, for example, there is Zoom tiredness that has happened across in schools. And there is going to be a reaction to this. There are going to be two kinds of reaction. There's going to be one official reaction that you see, for example, from Karnataka where they keep saying that you're going to shut down online. Two, three rounds, this has gone back and forth. And so there is going to be people coming and saying that this does not work. A lot of people who look at a bad teacher in classroom, the school parents are not seeing it. Now you see the same bad teacher performing online worse than usual. So Zoom enabled bad teaching basically is getting promoted in a big way, let's say. Now when something like this happens, what parents realize or come to a very quick conclusion may not be the right conclusion, but they come to a conclusion saying online does not work. But they don't necessarily come to a conclusion saying bad teachers are there in my school. They come to a conclusion that this methodology that you are now using or you're seeing is the problem. They never saw the bad teacher working at school either before. But what people come to a conclusion depends on what they see. So there is going to be, I mean, I expect and I think everybody should start to expect there is going to be a huge backlash that is going to come. While the current phase where there was such a lot of adoption, there is also going to be a backlash where many people who might have become customers will go back saying online does not work. In fact, we have seen this earlier. For example, when a company comes in and does a lot of edutainment and serious learners suddenly come back and say, no, I don't want that type of animation based and just too much of games. I want serious learning, right? So that backlash you've seen already with the education market. Many times education market has gone through phases. Sometimes there has been a company which has gone in a big way, like I do competent going into schools. For a while, schools would come back and say, no, technology does not work in education. So we have to be very careful about the backlash that is a huge thing that is brewing right now. I mean, while on one side, there is a growth of usage of online and so on. And there is demonstration. We have to recognize that many people who have gone online are not people who have done enough work on online. They don't know how to teach online. They're looking up there when they're talking. So you can see the teachers, the video is not even clear. The teacher is not even talking to that person. So many times, all of this is creating a lot of issue. There is also a very bad bandwidth in certain cases. So for example, while there is one advantage of the live kind of session, there's also the problem that when you go back and forth on the live session and that sometimes gets cut, how people perceive this and therefore their conclusion afterwards is that maybe this won't work. I'm not saying that that'll be true for all the people. Hopefully many more people who have got shifted or have had to try online will stick with it. But I also think that there'll be many people who might have gone online if they're done it a little bit more slowly with a little better preparation, with a better product. Now maybe they've basically kind of had the experience so much that they won't even try. So that is something that one needs to seriously look at. Another problem that has happened because there are so many free things available, people who might have wanted to purchase are now doing this shopping experience. They're saying, okay, let me try this free. Oh, this does not work. Let me try that free. That does not work. Let me try that free. So therefore that element of shopping around to see what is going to work before settling down, I think that also something that we must look at. So it is slightly more complex than a always complete 100% positive direction. And partly depends on how fast or how quickly are they able to see good online experiences. Because what I do find is once they see a good online experience, then they're willing to get converted. But if they don't see a good online experience online, too much online exposure before they manage to see good online experience can also spoil the market. Like sometimes in a marketplace, if let us say there were three good products but there are 100 bad products, by the time the user searched the first 10 products, they have got tired. They say all products are bad. They never got to the three good products. So that is something that we need to be wary of. It is important to promote and focus on the good online products because then the whole online space itself grows. I'm sorry for all of those who are waiting. I mean, I'm sorry. I have to go through a little bit of patience as needed. I'll come to you Pulkit with the same question. Just a quick takeaway for your company. I'll come to others who are just waiting. I have just following a quick going through everyone quickly and just to come. So hi, thanks for having me and with such an esteemed panel here, a lot of learnings. So I think the points are almost the same which everyone has covered. I've been in this journey for quite some time now, almost 15 years from offline institution to online. We have been doing live online since 2014. So good to see that. It's becoming a norm now. What we used to, it used to be a struggle to tell everyone in the ecosystem as well as parents that this is a valid and effective way of learning. But yeah, having said that, in my mind, this COVID definitely has short circuited a lot of stuff but education is a big, deep problem. And I think all of us together at Tech we need to do a lot of hard work to solve it in a way that we can provide predictable learning experiences at scale. So what I've learned is doing things at a boutique level where the scale is less, it's easier but if you want to do things at a massive scale keeping predictability of learning outcomes which are mathematically measurable, right? In fact, it's a tremendously challenging and tough problem which all of us are together in. So I think a lot of innovations from all sides will emerge very fast now. So that's what we all are looking forward to here. Gopti, can you hear me? Some quick thoughts from you? Yeah, so I can hear. Thanks, I think what Balaji said actually covered it. So we do see a lot of children coming up here and like they wanted to actually explore but particularly like children from rural areas they actually find it very difficult and they want to get good, they don't want to miss out at the same time at the same time, they want to learn something. So we had to be very clear. We should not be in a rush to actually offer them solutions because most of the time that will also backfire our product of this thing because they may not be ready to actually consume the product. So Aaguru has been like very clear on like if we feel like for this particular section of children, it is not going to help them out. So we tell them, okay, it is not going to help you out and it should not because lot of times what happens is in schools and other places they try to actually like take something out and like give it to the students in a hurry which is actually not a good thing because finally they end up getting a very bad learning experience. So we have actually conducted a free sessions for school children. So that actually like really like lot of children like the courses and all but that was completely like we have done for almost 40 to 50 schools but still we were very particular to do it in the entire one and entire two cities and we have not explored to tie three because we are not very clear whether that content will be suitable for those students. So when as an tech player, we should be clear because our product may not be suitable for all the students. Right, right. Prajavali if I come to you with the same question quick thought. What I believe is that what we have recently seen is that reaching out to different people, different sector has become easier because of the online education. While right now somebody is setting in a small village can actually go out and watch videos by way down to by a grad, you know, my bad. So we have been able to reach out to the depths of India but then obviously and a lot of study goes to the internet access that we have got. Probably India was made ready by Geo about two, three years ago and you know, for example, limelight specializes in content delivery networks where the access has to be really good, right? So that we are able to view the videos very properly, right? That's a very important point here. Hi, this is a separate question I have on that completely. But what we have also seen is that the main education will not be, you know, right now we are in a phase. I think this is going to go back to an extent the way it was before. But this is going to take some time, probably till February. But you know, when it comes to upskilling or preparing for a multitude of examinations, they, you know, swear, you know, online education will continue and people will be able to, you know, adapt, adopt this a lot better than earlier. So now they have been, they have gotten used to this. This is my take on. Right, Riya and then Mr. Hammer, I want to come to you. Riya, I want to come to you first to your quick thoughts and then I go to Mr. Hammer. Yeah, sure, thanks. So, I mean, just I think everyone's kind of covered a lot of what the universal challenges would have been. I think in our case, you know, the advantage that we have in the ed tech space in general is in a way we are a solution to the COVID environment, right? Like your students can't go to school, like your students can't go to offline tuition anymore, like we have a ready to go solution, right? And I think with Lido, because we are a younger company, I think our challenges were a bit unique, mostly because there were a lot of things on our roadmap that we had to kind of just put the, like push the pedal on as soon as we went into lockdown. So some of the challenges we faced with were sort of with device compatibility. So kind of overnight having to ensure that we could provide solutions that were compatible across mobile devices, since, you know, students were not able to kind of access the tablets that we were selling anymore. We sell hardware along with our product as well. And then primarily just transitioning to a digital funnel entirely, right? So with marketing that came with kind of overnight, like having to roll out like a free version of our app on the app store, so that we could give access to free content to students and then kind of use that as a sort of digital leads funnel from sales, kind of moving to a digital model. We had a feed on the street model up until then overnight having to kind of A-V test new digital models and then trying to account for reduced purchasing power as well, right? So kind of trying to figure out how to create different variants of SKUs of our products that will enable customers to purchase our products without having to break the bank in a time when there was no income for a lot of families. So I think those are main, the challenges that we've been through. Emma, your quick thoughts. I would like to kind of move the discussion a little bit away from what we have because I feel that there's a lot of agreement or consensus on the kind of positive or the positivities that this whole situation has brought upon us. But let me start with putting across a very conventional wisdom that has been there today that what demonetization did for digital payments COVID did for digital education. We also need to understand one thing is that while we are talking about the students and the ecosystem in general, we also need to understand that this has always been the case for the past one or two years. We have been moving towards it slowly but surely we have been moving towards more and more digital or online students taking online classes. The fact remains is of course, COVID has increased the pace, the kind of people coming on boarding and all that. But at the same time, I think we have missed out two very, very important stakeholders which was never there as part of the general ecosystem. One was the teacher. And the second was the students which are and both of them have typical problems which are like first of all the digital divide. You have schools and students and teachers who are in metros who have access to all these kinds of infrastructure as well as you know, digital courses and all kinds of resources available. But at the same time out of 32 corrupt students, you have 30 corrupt students or 28 corrupt students who do not have access to either the proper infrastructure like devices, et cetera. Or they do not know how to have that kind of a bandwidth, et cetera. Plus the teachers, when we talk about the teachers as we somebody rightly said earlier, Mr. I think Mr. Balaji said that earlier there was no focus on the teacher. She was an invisible part, but today when we talk to our teachers, the teachers are a very demotivated lot. One, because for a four hour class, she has to prepare for an eight hour session. She has to prepare for eight hours to have a four hour session. So, and then there's a parent sitting in front of her in a session and then there's a lot of that thing happening and there's a lot of demotivation there. The students are not able to properly understand. So, of course, there needs to be a blended learning as I was probably saying in the beginning that we will have to go back to blended learning nodar. But I think the more major thing or the major sector that will be affected by this whole thing would be probably the coaching tuition centers because as more and more people move towards online learning and online coaching, these typical conventional offline coaching tuition centers, definitely they'll be affected. Schools will have to be adopt, but we'll have to take more of these middle rung or the lower middle class students and the teachers into the mainstream because that is where we have to focus because the top 10 was always there and they would have nevertheless been there. But how do we take care of these is a challenge that we have to all answer. Right, great. So we have first lovely roundup and so many insights. I want to come to you, Charles and Ashwin, you know. So what we have also summed up and what we have experienced in this conversation is that connectivity, deliverability, apart from having great content is critical. Somehow I think this is a resounding thing. Tell me quickly, how do you see COVID impact on EduTech players so far and what needs to be done to make it more seamless? I want to start with that talk. Yeah, sure. One thing I want to thank everybody is there was very good learning experience to hear all these opinions around the room here. Let me assure you that everything everybody discussed is also happening over here in the US, exactly the same things. You know, one thing that wasn't mentioned is when this all started so quickly, many students didn't even have a mobile device or laptop to use in some areas. So, you know, all kinds of problems, but anyhow, you're not alone. So I think part of the problem is just the surprise of everything. You know, nobody had time to prepare for this and everybody's learning as they go. So we clearly identify what works, what doesn't work and what needs to happen now is a lot of maturity and innovation in this area because one thing that we learned in the study results is even as we move away from the pandemic, a lot of the behaviors that people have adopted are going to continue. Maybe in the younger students probably back to school but for colleges and universities, they already were using online a lot for some of the courses. So they'll continue, but all the other types of usage like social interaction, like working from home, people have learned to do it well and it's gonna continue. I know here a lot of discussions, can we reduce the amount of office space we have because it's not necessary for everybody to come to the office and that's gonna continue. So I think a lot, we have to get all this right because it's only gonna become part of society now that more things will be online for a long, long time. There's always silver linings. We've seen air pollution. The air is so clear. You've seen these videos of some cities that used to look like it was always fog and now you see crystal clear, you can see the mountains and the earth is getting a break right now. And so I'm looking forward to less commuting, more things online. So it's very broad beyond just this learning problem is just tremendous changes and watch the innovations that happen in the next year or two around this. Ashwin, do you wanna act with us? No, I think this was great. I heard a lot of good feedback, experiences from all the panelists. Charles kind of gave you guys the 30,000 feet on the impact of COVID. I'm more focused in India so I'll just talk about India. Here, I think I heard a lot of pointers around connectivity. Big challenges I think we're all experiencing is that if you look at just the COVID impact on the infrastructure, the telecommunication and internet infrastructure, that's taken a major hit. If you were accessing Prime or Netflix, you will see that they've dropped the bit rates of their videos. They're not really sacrificing on the audio, but they're sacrificing on the video. India is unique to my business, the reason being that when we work with our ed tech education, you're learning customers. For us, the biggest challenge is not only solve the user experience for students, teachers who are their customers, online in the tier one cities, but how do you help solve that or give that same amount of seamless experience to audiences who are in tier two and tier three cities? I mean, I heard Gaurav talk a little bit about that. I heard, I think we had to mention about connectivity issues in remote areas, but one of the big things limelight's trying to do and it's still work in progress is that we're trying to ensure that all the students logging into our customers' platforms are getting a great connectivity and a great experience in areas, in remote areas of India. Mumbai, Delhi, West Bengal, I mean, usually have good infrastructure. The ISPs have taken a hit. I think we all know that. Even their infrastructure is limited. So for us, it's paramount that we are able to deliver the experience across different devices, different formats of video, and give the audiences at least a bare minimum experience of quality video, if not high quality, and what you can't compromise on is the hearing, the audio piece. If that goes, that's a bigger impact than the video. So that's kind of what we're doing. On the third side, and this is coming up a lot from the feedback I hear again from our customers, is infrastructure security is becoming more and more important. And when I talk about infrastructure security, sometimes when we run a business, we often are looking at growth, right? We're not looking at slowing things down, but with growth comes challenges and loopholes in our security infrastructure, in the cyber security infrastructure, as we start enabling tech and make it as a big platform for us to launch our new learning platforms. You've recently heard all the news in the market about some of the security breaches. Those will just continue to happen and grow. There are good players, there are bad players, like Charles said, they're good bots and bad bots. It's critical, folks. We're in the center of all that activity and noise. You all are business leaders of your business. It's critical, it's absolutely important that you guys think of a security strategy while you're developing your growth strategy. Both have to go hand in hand because it's not a must-have, it's not a good-to-have, it's a must-have solution. So that's my two cents, yeah, thanks. Gaurav Toshinwal, I want to come to you. If you can hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Okay, perfect. So this here is this, you know, being a leader, a thought leader in the education space. Tell me, do you think there is a need gap, for example, e-learning, edutech players, for example, edutech players is the right word. They focused on creating content, but they never thought they would also have to deal with a point where infrastructure conversation will come, you know, and we never thought the demand would surge the way it did. Do you think now the infrastructure part has come, you know, vividly, a big point, something to deal with for all the content creators out there to deal with it, there to somehow find a solution of putting this content across seamlessly? Do you think this is where it is headed now? Indeed it is, I mean, the whole situation has forced a lot of people to do a lot of innovative and different things, especially all of us in edtech. And that also presented a lot of challenges at the same time. Since while, for example, we are trying to launch some new products, but we know that the infrastructure cannot take that much bandwidth to give us the latencies that we would ideally want. So I think from that point of view, yes, the landscape is, the infrastructure itself is going to, and the way the infrastructure grows is also going to play a huge role in that, yeah. Perfect. Udit, the same question to you. How are edutic players coming to terms with this, you know, the extra stress on infrastructure? And in this webinar, a couple of times, we had an audio stress thing, you know, it's like technology is, because there's so much of demand on technology, how do we enable this? Is this a concern? What are you doing to address it? A lot of innovations I see happening from the technology standpoint, I think all of us, all of us have a slowly moving and adopting CDN networks, if we already weren't there. So I think even for streaming our own videos, we are utilizing CDN networks. Many of us are doing this for the very first time, and also seeing pricing challenges there. So a lot of, you know, I think last month we had around maybe 50 terabytes of data consumed on our platform. And videos was not our primary source. It was only recorded videos getting watched over the next year. So yeah, we immediately had to move to a CDN network. So I think people are utilizing CDN now, better than before. Balaji, with the same question to you, and when we talk about that, Bharat is consuming it where network issues are already there, you know? A quick two-minute answer to this, you know, how important is distribution in the whole game? And how are you making it more, you know, kind of experiences more smooth, seamless? How are you in that? I think basically distribution is a huge part of this whole game. There's no question about it. And like for example, many of the places where we are working, we do one is to look at cities where they already know how to access, they come online and so on. So there is really not much of a problem in terms of people accessing things in more elite schools, urban areas and so on. But when you go to small towns, when you work with villages and so on, there you have to look at the fact that first only access is mobile. Most of them don't even have access to a laptop or something. So you have to basically make it available in a format. First of all, data is a big problem for many of them. So they have very limited data connectivity. So you have to look at content in a way where you can give like a small video but a lot of text-based content that they can use, game-based things which can be downloaded, some of it offline, some of it online. So we have to develop a whole lot of technology things that for example, now we have lots of kids who are in villages using our fraction scores or English math content, et cetera. And most of it is like little bit of online, a very small percentage that they would use online. A large part of it is downloaded onto their phone so they can use it offline. So you will need to do that kind of a combination to ensure that where connectivity is an issue and it is going to be a big issue, sometimes it's not just connectivity, data costs are important. So therefore, for many of these places, you will need to look at, particularly if you're talking about Bharat and you're talking about rural areas, definitely there is going to be a huge issue of pricing, price point, data cost, all of that is going to play a big role in terms of access. We are now working for example, with a lot of the rural schools and very clearly live classes do not work there. I mean, I know that live classes make a difference when you're looking at urban areas. We have been doing that for several years now and we know that that has a definite advantage in certain contexts. But when you go to places where the bandwidth is really low, it is very irritating for the child also to use live classes. So they're shifting, sometimes not even fully video, part video, part, because the buffering will be too much. So you'll have to use part video and you'll have to use a lot of, I would say game text-based content, something that can be done on a phone or an app kind of thing makes a big difference. Perfect, perfect. I'm sorry, I'm just quickly going through this to minister each panelist because we want to cover as much as possible. Poonam, I want to come to you with the same thought. Has, is distribution the big conversation for ad tech? It is and it has been from the very early stage for us. We realized that connectivity is an issue in the country, even in the urban areas, it is not fantastic. And, and when we bring learning content, it is rich media. So for that experience, where we created a solution which was offline, the SD card driven embedded in the tablets and that is available in the rural area or a far off area, we deliver a solution even on a tap. Though finally we feel the real penetration is on the cellular device because having an app was very critical and we also, we have everything online, but we have made it on the app and also in a offline format. And I think that one thought I want to leave you with that COVID has pushed even fansitters online. And finally, when we get offline again and we think the world is normal, what will be a blended model, but what will require for the ad tech companies and the users to have agility of response from moving seamlessly from off to on and as per their requirement and optimization. From this will come new economic models in the business for the schools also and institutions where the right now they're going with 4,000 students because they have 4,000 classrooms. Now they might hit the 10,000 and 15,000 by a blended model. So this was also enough. Arjun, your thoughts, your quick thoughts on this. If you can hear me, Arjun. Okay, I'll go to Ahmed. I'll come to you quickly, your thoughts on this. Ahmed, I think I totally agree with what Ms. Balajin has said that we have to move towards what we call as an offline come online model where if you have to cover more and more of these rural and that part of the digital divide have nots. I think we are also doing the same thing because if you also see that schools have always been looking for an offline content. They have never looked for any online content because they know that there's no network or infrastructure out there. Even for the students, more and more students to come in we have to create more and more offline content so that ease of access and economies of kind of costing and all that it helps them in terms of converting on these of covering on this. Riya, your thoughts on this. Hi. Yeah, so I think Balaji mentioned this. We do a lot of the same things where we have reduced reliance on video content, additional reliance on written content, activities and stuff in the classroom. The challenge for us is providing offline content in a classroom and in a virtual classroom environment. So I think it's definitely more of a blended approach for us as well, heavier on the online, which is some of the sort of bigger challenges that we face with people in tier two and tier three cities as well. So some of the things that we've accomplished within our virtual classroom is throttling of video so that we automatically reduce video quality when we detect bad network, alerting students and teachers both in the classroom when we detect poor network, enforcing certain amount of certain network quality in the tech check prior to class before even allowing students to enter a class. And then at the end of the day, in the virtual classroom, always prioritizing audio over a video. So when you kind of reach a point where video quality is too low to continue, we try to allow the audio feed to continue at least. Perfect. Karan, tell me about this magic of seamlessness. How is this happening at your end? So your audio is muted. I think Balaji and Poonam, they are summed it well. That it has to be a mix of online and offline, a blended model especially for Bharat because connectivity there is much worse than what we experienced here in urban area. What I wish to bring to attention of companies like companies that Charles is leading is that there has to be a very dedicated and a very different solution for the rural market. One of the mistakes that we end up making is that probably we think India is one market, but when you start going deep, you realize that each state, each state is a very, very different market. So the solution that you build, that you start building for India may not work for Bharat. Bharat is the rural part of our country. So for that, you would have to have a very different kind of solution. I don't know if your organization today has some solution that can cater to that market. Second is slightly off the track, but I think a relevant point here. The quality of teachers and the quality of education in India is going to improve. Because till yesterday, there was no limelight on the tutors. They could teach whatever they would want. But now because there are watchful eyes watching them all the time, but the quality of education will improve. Long-term impact of COVID, long-term positive impact of COVID will slowly, slowly die down on K-12, but it's still relevant for the coaching institutes. Because schools will again open and teachers and students will be back in the physical environment. But coaching institutes and the rural, the scope that remains there. And I think I agree with both Odit and Polkit, that education, I believe, teaching especially is an art. You cannot replace teacher out of the system. I still remember there used to be some days when we used to party whole night, but still would attend the next day's lecture because the teacher would create that spell in the class. So a pure play video might not be able to create that impact. So you have to have live streaming classes. And for live streaming classes, you will have require a very different kind of solution. Right. Kush, are you here? Okay. I'll come to you, Prajapal, your thoughts on this. Okay. I think connectivity is actually very, very important. Distribution is very important. That is for resounding things. Gaurav, if I can ask you the same question. How to, I mean, how to meet this, how to break this gap between great content and making it available to the other side? Yes, I think as all of us are mentioning about the need of right tech also in place. Like if you look at, we have taken a slightly different approach because we knew that there was a connectivity issue. So all our live class, so we built our own tech for streaming the live classes. We don't use CDN for that. And we've been able to stream a live class for about 256 Kbps. So we don't face now much of the challenge in terms of streaming a live class. Step two, once a class is done, that goes recorded and that gets delivered through a CDN. Now, this is about just a delivery part of it so that everybody has an access to the content. And again, second part is about the customer success. Now, how will this candidate will become successful? Okay, so at that side, I think it has to do a lot with how you structure your entire class. How does your curriculum follow? You have a live class, then you have an assessment. Are you tracking those? So we have small WhatsApp groups between, suppose there's like we have classes as large as, I don't know, you laugh, but as large as 3000 students. Okay, so now how do you manage those students in a single classroom? Okay, and we are talking about 40, 50 students cannot be managed. You cannot give them personalized attention. So how do you do it at that kind of a scale? So we've created small groups. You've been talking to them as I earlier mentioned, again, there's a secondary teacher who is working with them. There are a lot of discussion forums which has been created for them. They are coming, asking about. At our side, we are doing a lot of follow-ups with respect to their assessment scores. So we feel a lot more personalized touch, which is largely around taking the danda, give us, you're not there in the class, why your scores are still not improving. Tell us what we can do for you. I think we have taken a pretty traditional approach, like because we work with coaching center. So like we learned from them that let's take this approach, figure out what has to be automated and then just don't run for an automation. And I think this is something which has really worked well. Perfect. Praju, if I can come to you, if you can hear me, it's the same thoughts, you know, of creating a great experience for end users, you know. How do we enable this given that technology is stressed, you know, distribution networks are overloaded? How are you, what are you doing in that way, you know, to address this problem? The thing is, most of the videos, you know, the problem comes when you're delivering the video any lecture live, right? That's when the problem happens that in between, if the connection drops, just faced it with poonam right now, right? Because in the conversation, this happened, this can happen everywhere and then students might get stressed a lot. Right. It's all about, you know, video session first, live session, and, you know, we have a recorded session for that and then a doubt clearing session, you know, as a follow-up session for the students. So that would be actually quite good. And again, it's all about the network that we have. If we are able to compress our videos in such a way that it doesn't use a lot of bandwidth and there's no lag, this works a lot and obviously a good CDN would help us. You know, at least in India, you know, at certain points, I think if you have, you know, the service close to the users, it should work fine. So most of, no, no, we have a social college students. What we're trying to do is we are trying to provide, you know, technical videos there and we have worked in the past with other large coaching students also. So that's the things that we have faced, you know, when people are in their home, right? Not everybody's in their, you know, in their colleges nowadays, they are in their hometown and their network is very slow. So it's where the problems arise. And also encryption of the videos and security of videos is also a very important aspect where, you know, most of us have a video contents available and things students try to tend to record those sessions and then only get out. I think this would, some of those people, for example, other people might have faced these things where people record videos and then they share it on Google Drive. Have to come up with a mechanism to stick that also, you know, our dynamic watermarking system and enable download right from the integrated videos. So those are things that everybody needs nowadays. Sure. Anuj, your thoughts and then I come to pulpit after that. Yeah, so I think technology can solve these problems and I think this is very important to actually invest into the right technologies and right architecture. So as we mentioned that how to use the CDN effectively and then how to actually make use of the right set of technologies which you are using in your app or in your websites, that is important, right? These things cannot be done in like a day or two, right? When you actually think about a product creation, then you always think about, you have to think about all these things. So I think right set of strategies in terms of technical architecture, using right CDNs and right tools to build kind of your product and using less data when you are actually streaming the content to the user and actually giving them the fallback of, let's suppose there is a drop in the network, then how you are actually solving the problem of the student by giving them a recorded video as soon as possible. So these things actually kind of solve this problem and I think tech could give a better solution in terms of giving a distribution to these kind of areas where we have a network connectivity issue. So tech is the important part here. So right set of technologies needs to be used to actually get this done. Polkat, your thoughts? Yeah, so I have slightly different thoughts there. So way back in 2014 when we started live, we started by building our own infrastructure and everything. Later on, I realized that there are multiple problems to solve. I think a lot of things will converge as we go ahead. So I would love to take, in fact, what we are doing is we are taking root of relying on the experts like Limelight in the field because they know this side of the technology much better to solve the problem of connectivity, providing solution at a very low bandwidth, though we are doing our bit as well to fine tune it. But what do we, I want to work more towards is the other side of the problem which the group talked about earlier. How can we create predictable learning experiences, academic learning experiences for the kids? How can we provide better content as Poonam was talking about? How can we personalize the learning journeys for each and every kid? And other side of the problems are being taken care by the companies like Limelight, to the players like Geo, to the government push. So on one side, the connectivity problems will keep getting solved. On the other side, my thought is to solve the other side of the problem and I think the things will converge. So that's my take on the thing. Gaurav Toshnwal, I mean I started with you but would you like to add something to it before I go to Charles and Ashwin? Nothing particular. I think it's the marriage of product and technology at the end of the day. Like whatever the constraints are there in terms of technology, product has to work around that. I mean constraints could be anywhere on any level be it CDN, be it the costs, be it the network management, be it the network operator, anywhere. So I think, I mean in general, I think the infrastructure is or technology is not as bigger bottleneck I think because we have sufficient amount of solutions and technologies which are good to stream a live class or a video on demand at 2G, 3G speeds as well. So yeah, I think it's a question of what sort of spending are you ready to do on something and how much benefit a consumer or a user gets from that. Right. So it finally comes to you Charles and Ashwin. I mean you guys have to say what is the solution to this? I mean how do we enable this distribution? I mean now we have seen content everybody has. Now they have this real issue. The other day I was watching a video and the network was so bad. You know, they were just showing the news that it was looking like the teacher is speaking in Chinese. She was speaking in Hindi. So it's a major concern. What are the solutions? What is line like going here to help all that? Yeah, so yeah. Sure, so since I know this very well the data is clear that once the pandemic abates that the traffic isn't going down. It's just gonna be maybe a little bit but it's gonna be continuing growth. We know we have to just keep on adding to capacity. We have to keep innovating in technologies. You know, we've done things like try to optimize for poor connections with different TCP stacks. You know, you sacrifice video to make sure the audio stays solid. And we just know we have to keep growing as fast as we can everywhere. It's not just, you know, India is a particular hotspot. Right. There's others in the world we just have to, we have to keep adding, you know, and we're doing it. You know, we have, we have the plans and we have the support of the board to, you know, just keep expanding. You know, it doesn't stop and keep innovating on protocols and so forth to, you know, solve these connectivity problems in rural areas. You know, so if I want, you know, one comment I want to make is we're using this, as we're talking about this, we see these issues with Zoom. And, you know, it's the same problem we all have. You know, in December, Zoom was sort of a startup and December Zoom had 10 million users. Today they have 300 million users. That's pretty incredible that they were able to do it even this well in that short period of time because it, and it was very quick. It was sort of in February, 10 or 20 million users. And then within weeks, it went over 100 million. And then another few weeks to 300 million. That the fact that they could even do that at all is pretty amazing to me. And they'll, you know, they'll improve, you know, but it's interesting using these same tools. So technology can solve a lot of problems. Just keep investing and keep doing it. Yeah. Ashwin, do you final words? No, I think there's not being said, you know, my job today was to just kind of quietly hear and do all the feedback coming from our esteemed panelists. I try to take the pain behind the statements, which are the pain behind the scenes of everyone's business. As a sales guy, that's kind of what I work on, understanding the real challenges. My message to everyone is, you know, there's lots of technology out there. That's not right, right? What you guys are good at is you understand your education business. Don't get your hands too dirty with technology. There are experts out there who are focused on solving those problems for you. So have some faith and trust on them and they'll solve it. Keep growing and scaling your business and let the rest do the rest. On from an India perspective, you know, we are focusing big time on tier two and tier three cities for our new living customers. Tier one, of course, tier one, but tier two and tier three cities is my mandate. How do we give our customers' customers great user experience across different devices, different networks in smaller towns? Because that's their growth, that's the scale. And then we see also gaming coming in as a big factor in in terms of user interactions, how you keep your users engaged online, you know, that's becoming a part of the teaching paradigm. Security I already mentioned. So yeah, I mean, I think this has been a great experience for me as well. We talk to a lot of business folks in my line of business, right? It's for a change, it's good to meet the e-learning and the education space and sort of the OTT and the broadcasting space. That's a different set of challenges. So I appreciate everyone giving us the opportunity and letting us present our products as well. So thank you all. Thank you so much for these wonderful views. I thank you all for your time. It has been a great discussion and merits another discussion, of course. And I have so many questions on my WhatsApp that I'm sorry, but out of time and over time, maybe next time I can pose those questions. We are very grateful for your time. Thank you. Thank you everyone. We really appreciate your time, giving us your time and see you soon. Thanks again. Thank you so much. Yeah, stay safe. Stay safe everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you.