Gudjon’s Blog

Within the IPTV industry, the hospitality market is somewhat fuzzy. This market has its challenges, primarily because it barely scales and the deployment of sufficient solutions becomes too costly.

This is bound to change now with

On the Zignal Apps Marketplace, we foresee various TV applications that could be beneficial for hotel deployments. I expect some apps to be developed by Industria but most by third party developers.

A solution for the hospitality market needs to include the following features:

• Good international TV channel line-up
• Up-to-date Video on Demand service
• Hotel information screens on the TV
• Integrated hotel services like display of restaurant menu, housekeeping, event booking and hotel surveys
• Flight schedule of nearest international airports
• Local weather information
• Messaging support, connecting the PMS system with on-screen TV messages
• On-screen display for incoming voice calls
• Targeted advertising based on customer profile
• Simple ways to monitor and support daily operations like reminders & voting on TV-shows/movies, EPG maintenance, STB monitoring, QoS and customer profile management
• HD screen support
• … just to name a few.

This is a great opportunity for systems integrators that are specializing in solutions for the hospitality market. With Zignal Cloud, anyone can use our XML-based API interfaces for anything from provisioning to billing management. It also means that custom hospitality TV applications can be created using our Zignal Application SDK.

Integrating to the property management software (PMS) is important, as this is the only interface the front desk staff uses. On customer check-in, the TV should have the customer name on the TV screen for greetings and a clean billing record on the video usage. As the customer rents movies, Zignal should add the price for it immediately to the customer bill in the PMS solution.

Already there is a jungle of PMS software solutions out there. I can name Galaxy, Fidelio Micros, Opera, Encore, Jaguar, just to name a few. Each of these PMS softwares has their own versions with its own flavour on how to integrate. For example, I have seen our professional services guys implementing a XML Web Service interface over 422 serial communications to the Fidelio Opera system. Not the most reliable integration around.

Integrators use the open XML interface of the Zignal Platform to connect it to the various types of PMS software. This means the PMS software at the front-desk controls the TV experience and feature set.

As Zignal offers great TV experience on HD screens, it opens up a good opportunity for hotels to upgrade now, moving to HD ready flat TV screens. It also offers better space saving on top of a much better TV experience. As the HD screens offer much higher resolution, these screens are also a viable choice for using TV Apps for services like Email or just browsing the web.

A few points on the deployment note:

• By using Zignal Cloud, there is no need to install complex software infrastructure at the hotel or hospital premises. This lowers both cost and complexity.
• The hotel just needs a basic Internet connection to access the Zignal Cloud. The Zignal Client in the set-top box is designed in a way that the load between the box and the Cloud network is minimum, basically only during the set-top box boot time, when the Zignal Client is being uploaded to the box. This means the hotel can just use a DSL connection for communicating with the Zignal Cloud.
• To lower the cost of on-site streaming equipment, hybrid set-top boxes can be used utilizing DVB-C, DVB-S or DVB-T transmissions. This means that no IP streaming equipment is needed for the TV channels.
• If hybrid boxes are used, the only IP streaming equipment used on-site is the video server for the On Demand video catalogue. VOD servers are always becoming more cost effective, in addition to some interesting open source initiatives.
• For pure IPTV boxes, streaming equipment is needed for trans-coding signals in either DVB-S, DVB-T or DVB-C to the IP network within the premises. There are various new low cost offerings available on the market that can be utilized for this.
• Hotels with the luxury of having fat IP pipe-using fibre can leverage hosting facilities in some markets for the IP streaming head end. This in turn reduces the complexity for hotels, which do not have to worry about maintaining the streaming equipments at the hotel as part of their daily operation.

Systems integrators and other specialists in the hospitality market should sign-up for the Cloud and get in touch with us to take this further.

Furthermore, software vendors of in-house created IPTV solutions for hotels should seriously consider using their funds on more value creation for their companies rather than inventing the wheel again by creating a base IPTV solution. Zignal can behave like a great toolbox or developer’s kit for software companies that need to implement custom solutions.