The Future Of Television In Hotel Guestrooms

By Derek Gale, Associate Editor -- HOTELS Magazine, 11/1/2006

The future of television in hotels may be as simple as four letters, and the letters have nothing to do with content—they’re all about delivery. IPTV is a method for delivering digital television programming, video-on-demand and other rich media content using an Internet protocol (IP) network. This delivery system has a number of benefits, including offering high-quality digital signals, drastically reduced cabling costs and economizing network bandwith. The cabling costs are so greatly reduced because a broadband IP network backbone allows hotels to provide Web access and voice-over IP telephony to guests on the same network (commonly referred to as offering a “triple play” of voice, video and data). Another advantage of IPTV is the potential to enhance entertainment revenue by offering interactive services or by allowing guests to opt-in to niche regional channels for a small fee.

To consider IPTV, hotels must have the proper cabling network infrastructure to guestrooms in place. This means cabling that can handle high-bandwith needs, like delivering HDTV video signals. Cat-6 cabling throughout is an example of appropriate infrastructure for IPTV. For this reason, IPTV may make the most sense for new-build hotels or those undergoing huge-scale renovation projects.

Asia, and Hong Kong in particular, is a leader in IPTV deployment. Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, for example, is one of the first in the industry to offer IPTV and PVR (personal video recording), both of which are deployed through KoolConnect’s solution in the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong. “Based upon the interest in the technology and the response of many hoteliers, it appears that IPTV and PVR are going to have a huge impact on the industry,” says Eran Sherin, KoolConnect co-founder and president.

Another Hong Kong-based hotel group, The Peninsula Hotels, also is an early adopter. “We are gradually installing an IP-based delivery system to all our hotels,” says Fraser Hickox, general manager, research & development, The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd., Peninsula’s parent company. “I believe we are going to see remarkable development in this area, which will reach far beyond a local content package in each hotel. We are seeing various film libraries springing up that in time will be accessible in real time in much the same manner as dialing a telephone number.”

Hickox also mentions the effects of Sling Media’s Slingbox product, which allows people to watch their personal television programming remotely (but chews up bandwith), and says Peninsula is buying its own networks so the company will have the agility to move between emerging technologies and to take advantage of such technologies to keep guests satisfied and increase revenues.

To sum up, “I expect IPTV to take a significant step [in] the coming five years and impact guests’ expectations,” says Marcel Kouw, project leader at Servex, The Netherlands. “This translates into infrastructure networking and IP provision, therefore ever increasing bandwidth demands remain important.”