SMARTreport - Deuromedia

IN-ROOM
ENTERTAINMENT
In this section, we look at In-Room Entertainment . Here, the biggest challenge is finding a
partner that really has the vision to deliver the next generation services that are required by
today’s guests. Many hotels are still stuck in the “Hollywood and Adult” model, neither of which
are entertaining in the context necessary for a hotel. What we need is a complete rethink. There
are some new, smaller players out there today, and the future looks interesting. Whether they
can get sufficient foothold to make really significant advances in a landscape dominated by a
few large players who have vested interests in not moving as fast as the hotels would like, that’s
another thing. In terms of the key movements we see, HDTV is one of those movements, but HD
as part of a digital TV. It is part of a digital TV experience, and the move from analogue to
digital is the fundamental shift. To go from an analogue world to a digital world and all that this
means in terms of off-air television, is a huge jump, but it’s a jump that has already been made
by the consumer. If you have a television in your home today, the odds are that you have a
digital feed, whether it be over cable or satellite or terrestrial and you have a wide-screen LCD
or plasma TV with HDMI inputs... The consumer at home has already made that jump and many
of them have augmented their environment with a large number of channels and with a widescreen
TV and DVR with time shift. There is a huge expectation that walks into our rooms every
day and unfortunately in the majority of hotels it’s an expectation that simply isn’t met. The
notion that “We’re an international hotel and we provide CNN, so if you speak English, you
can watch CNN... that should be good enough for you...” It’s simply a notion that’s invalid
today.
Frankly, today when you’re coming from your home environment and you walk into a hotel, it’s
often pretty sad. Among the hotels there are leaders. I think the Mandarin Oriental is one of
those leaders and today we are opening a hotel after renovation in Munich that will have 800
TV channels and they will all be digital. Ease of selection then becomes a huge issue... the
channel up, channel down surfing model soon breaks down even if it ever was the right thing
to do. But assuming you know something about the guest... either you know who they are very
explicitly, or implicitly you know their language, their ethnicity and where they’ve come from
and so on, you can make some fairly astute choices for them and present channels which you
think they’re going to like. I may be just as simple as organising the channel-order so you put
Japanese channels at the top for a Japanese guest. That may be sufficient...
Nick Price