How many of you chose Betamax over VHS? Sorry to hear it. I'm sure it felt like a good idea at the time, but ultimately the better technology did not prevail and VHS won the day, and our shelf space. Being an early adopter has its risks in the consumer environment and the same can be said in the hospitality guest room.

I was invited to speak at a hotel conference on the impact of 3D TV in the guest environment. Clearly this is exciting stuff and everybody wants to hear more about it, but how many of you actually don those 3D glasses at home? If you do, where do you find the content to watch?

Despite the hype, 3D content remains limited and traditional broadcasters are battling the lack of penetration as well as the total lack of broadcast standards. We are even seeing some of the major PayTV providers such as Canal Plus in France abandon its 3D trials until a day when the barriers to roll out are removed, and more importantly, when content is available. This is a pragmatic approach when one considers that HD is still not mainstream in Europe. So while we play with 3D and it is fun to think about, we suggest that as hoteliers you concentrate first on the basics which are still the migration to digital and HD. You don't want to be stuck with a shelf full of Beta in a VHS future.

Take a walk around a landfill sometime. Okay, admittedly, this is not your average Sunday afternoon stroll, but were it to be, I am pretty certain you would come across a few cast aside pieces of technology that used to function as in-room hotel technology.

Today you would find CRT TVs by the ton, but not so long ago they were all operating in hotels and hoteliers had no choice but to use them. You would also find other, more obscure, pieces of hardware you wouldn’t imagine placing in the living room of your worst enemy. You might even find one of my favorite bizarre technology choices for hotels, the in-room keyboard.

In hotels, you would find the in-room keyboard in all sorts of places: by the side of the TV, in the drawer of a desk covered in dust, sitting on the minibar with scratches earned during its tenure as an improvised bottle-opener. What you rarely ever see are signs of use. People just don't need it. If interactive TV is to satisfy guests, it should be easy enough to use with a simple remote control, just like at home.

How many of you have a keyboard at home to drive your TV experience? Probably none of you. The typical TV experience is one of relaxation -- you are a "viewer" more than a "user," and are so by choice. But what about the Internet on TV experience? To get the full value out of the Internet, you obviously benefit from the use of a keyboard. This is where the experience is getting confused. There is a place for a "viewer" and a place for a "user" and they should not be treated as the same experience. Being a "user" effectively rules out the TV as a device for the provision of Internet -- it is a device best suited for viewing. There are a whole host devices better suited for Internet use: the laptop, the tablet or even the smart phone. So why shoehorn everything together?

Ultimately, few of you access the Internet via the TV at home. Possibly, you access simple TV-centric applications, but not the Internet as we know on a keyboard powered device. So why would you want to change your approach when you get to a hotel? Guest satisfaction is gained by the intelligent implementation of technology, and generally if a device is used in a certain manner at home it will be used in the same manner at the hotel. Intelligent technology implementation means spending money wisely to avoid having your new investment soon end up in the landfill.

Recently, one of our customers decided against placing an interactive TV system in their four star hotel. The reason? They thought that including a flashy LED TV with a traditional channel package would be enough. It has been in the past, right? Well, in-room entertainment is changing and for a four star hotel, that LED TV is no longer enough to separate them from the budget brand competition.

Many budget brand hotels are now providing guests flashy LED TVs of their own, and on top of that are offering free Internet, something many four-stars do not provide. The result is that the in-room guest experience, with the exception of the bed and room size, is remarkably similar between the budget brand and our four star customer (well nearly, since internet in the four star hotel still costs 20 euros).

So, what can higher-end hotels do to differentiate themselves from the competition? They should embrace iTV, and soon. These days, most customers have HD iTVs with movies on demand in their homes and are expecting the same entertainment experience when they travel. We know this because we have seen an increase in guest comment cards requesting the implementation of an in-room entertainment system to complement the flashy new LED screens.

By moving away from iTV, higher-end hotels risk a failure to differentiate themselves from budget brands and a failure to keep up with the entertainment standards of their customers.  That is not a good mix.

In the run up to the Tour de France, a client asked me if hotel guests could experience the well-known cycling race in 3D in their rooms. The answer at the time was unfortunately no as the event was not rebroadcast in 3D, compounded by the lack of standards and 3D hotel mode TVs.

However, we at Acentic decided to research how to potentially bring a 3D experience to our customers. Two Acentic employees were volunteered to this task - myself, Juan Aguirre, and our CFO Stuart Radcliffe. With 3D supposedly being as close to reality as one can get, we both decided to enter in a similar, but not quite equivalent experience to the Tour De France. That is The Royal British Legion’s Pedal to Paris cycle ride, taking place Sept. 1-5, 2011.

Our 22-rider Team Manpower, co-sponsored by Acentic, will join 300 others and embark on a four-day, 480km trip from London all the way to Les Champs Elysees. The event raises money for the fine institution that is The Royal British Legion to care for serving and ex-members of the British Armed Forces and their families.

In addition to fund raising, we see this four-day trip as valuable research into what a 3D Tour de France experience should be, albeit our cycle seats won’t be as comfortable as a living room armchair and our Lycra outfits are probably the last thing you want to see. However, whilst you await that 3D hotel experience (could be some time yet), please don’t hesitate to support our efforts at the following websites:

http://www.justgiving.com/juan-aguirre  or  http://www.justgiving.com/TeamManpower2011

All donations will go directly to The Royal British Legion. In the meantime, Stuart and I are busy training, shedding kilos and looking forward to a beer on the Champs Elysees as a reward for our four days of effort.

If you haven’t read this book by Sir Compton Mackenzie you should do so immediately. It’s an intriguing insight into the hardships of the Second World War and more particularly a Scottish island that is deprived of whisky since most of it was shipped off to the USA in exchange for assistance. When a ship carrying thousands of bottles is shipwrecked off the shores of this remote island you can only imagine the chaos that breaks loose. Makes for excellent reading and I am sure the movie will be fabulous as well! Most of you are by now wondering why Acentic is providing book reviews rather than movie reviews, but this great book sprang to mind as we implemented a tailored Grant’s Whisky User Interface in one of our hotels the other day. With the annual Grant’s whisky workshop being held in the property the wish was to provide a unique guest experience to its attendees. Acentic therefore devised a unique Grant’s Whisky User Interface for implementation during the workshop -every attendee experienced an elegant Grant’s whisky branded interface. Just an example of how flexible the Acentic Panorama HD platform is and how smart hoteliers make use of it to enhance their conference offering. I must also add a special thank you on behalf of one of our graphic designers and myself to the Columbus hotel in Monaco and Grant’s whisky for having put aside two bottles to assist our inspiration for future blogs and Graphical User Interfaces. As they would say in Scotland: Slainte. Here's tae ye.

The Movie: Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, released in 1949

Until recently, the stereotype was that men were incapable of focusing on more than one thing at a time, that we could not multitask--my wife will be the first to confirm some lingering truth in that perception. However, a recent study shows that man’s ability to multitask (or at least our perception of it) has changed, which presents a challenge to you as hoteliers, specifically as it regards in-room technology.

Oh, it was so easy twenty years ago when the only entertainment a guest had in his room was the TV and perhaps an outrageously priced telephone system. Options for entertainment were limited. Things got more complex with the advent of the laptop (remember the first ones with a battery the size of a brick?) and then broadband Internet. The TV had a competitor in the room, provided that the hotel had managed to implement a broadband solution. Then, mobile phones arrived, marking the death of that cash cow that was the hotel phone system. Today we have smartphones, increasingly complemented by snazzy tablets. The adoption rates for each successive device has accelerated exponentially; new technology catches on more quickly than it ever has. The travelling human being is now a walking antenna and (apart from the still unproven health risks) this poses a significant problem for hoteliers.

Let me go back to the subject of multitasking. A recent study by Deloitte entitled “The State of the Media Democracy” provided a startling insight into consumer behavior. The study found that 71% of Americans still rate watching TV as their favorite activity, however whilst watching TV:

- 42% of viewers are also online
- 29% are talking on cell phones
- 26% are using instant messaging or sending texts

While the study doesn’t reveal the gender of the participants, it’s fair to assume that a fair number of men were in the percentage of multitaskers.

Add to these numbers that 33% of consumers have a smartphone and that 56% use their smartphone as a replacement for their laptop when away from home, and it’s apparently that hoteliers have to cater to a remarkably complex world of technology options.

How do you deal with this complexity? I believe that you have to embrace it. My message to hoteliers is that you can no longer isolate each in-room topic.

Interactive TV can no longer be looked in isolation from broadband Internet (be it wired or wireless). Yes, I hear many of you say “we have a converged strategy” but usually that strategy is limited to the network these devices share not the actual services and applications being delivered. There are considerable synergies to be had between the devices and the content delivered to them; one unique platform needs to manage the way in which hoteliers communicate to their guests over these multiple devices rather than multiple fragmented systems.

Have we fully figured out how to best leverage all these devices? Probably not, but we do know that, from an organization point of view, a hotelier mustn’t fragment its approach.

A recent hotel chain I was speaking with on the topic of iTV sent me to a completely different team when the conversation shifted to broadband Internet. Both teams had their own agenda and little interaction except for infrastructure concerns. There is a connection between the technologies, so there needs to be a connection between the teams.

To develop a coherent guest entertainment and information multi-device strategy, it is necessary to implement cross-functional teams that go beyond single-purpose IT and purchasing teams to integrate marketing and e-marketing. As our devices connect, share purposes and build on each other’s strengths, so should we. We don’t have to embrace multitasking at the expense of organization--rather, hoteliers can look at multitasking as the means to connect services already available to create an in-room entertainment approach as complex and rewarding as the technological world we inhabit.

Acentic attended the Dubai Hotel Show last week and we showcased our Panorama HD integration with the new LD650 from LG. This show was the ideal event to showcase Acentic’s ability to deliver a cost effective IP solution with no in-room Set-Top Box. With the integrated solution from LG and Acentic,  IT departments at major luxury hotels no longer have to deal with disconnected rooms caused by removed cables. They can say goodbye to the simple day-to-day housekeeping of in-room systems with a simplified system installation. We did have some dubious visitors at the conference that believe the STB under the furniture is still the only way, but even they were impressed by the form factor and the speed of the Acentic Flash interface’s channel zapping times. Acentic is looking forward to further deployments in the Middle East region where we can leverage our Dubai network operations centre and local teams. We had a great show and had some fun, we even saw the most optimistic sales person we’ve ever seen at the Dubai show: a company that shall remain nameless actually selling outdoor heaters, tough sale with the outside temperature hitting 40 degrees C!

I have recently overheard a few discussions about the death of video on demand (VoD).  The talks described how internet delivered VoD to “connected LCDs” would mean the end of system integrators, but also it would be the end of all the established cable operators and satellite based PayTV companies. I must admit, it all sounded a bit extreme, but it did make a compelling argument for the uninitiated to invest in a connected LCD. At a recent conference attended by many of the leading cable operators, the Over the top (OTT) content services were looked at and analyzed in depth. The implications could be huge with new players. It makes me think of the hungry Internet giants coming in and competing effectively with established players who have massive network investments in place. However, reality is different, especially in Europe’s highly fragmented content market. With studios keen to protect their content, premium HD content is available only through tried and tested controlled networks with hardware-based security systems. Add to that specific rights for content commercialized in hotels, it may be some time before viable OTT services can be legally delivered to the guest’s TV. Acentic is however, immigrating its platforms to leverage the cloud through controlled and secure connections giving hoteliers the benefits of the cloud while providing the Studios with peace of mind.

I find it interesting how many guests now expect broadband Internet for free within a hotel room. I suppose most hotel guests are unaware of the fixed costs that a hotelier must incur to have a quality broadband system that delivers reliable connections day in and day out. Non-functioning broadband can lead to high costs for the hotelier. This was a problem that I recently discovered while on a stay in a European airport hotel. I entered my room after a long flight and I was eager to start working and listen to the champions league game over web radio. I proceeded to remove all the paper from the desk. That’s another random thought I had, do guests actually read all that clutter on the desk of the hotel room? Hoteliers should check out our iTV and mobile applications for intelligent guest communication. After removing the paper, I sought to connect to the web. My immediate reaction was to find the WiFi network. That was non-existent. I next looked for the wired connection, which led me to look in all the drawers of the room and even the closet for that elusive cable. After a while of searching I had to take the elevator down to reception, who directed me to the concierge. Finally I was back up to my room and 10 minutes later I received a visit from a very apologetic member of the hotel staff who handed me the prized cable. It still only took me 10 minutes of trying to get the connection to work, 10 minutes on a helpdesk line to someone on the other side of the planet who told me she would warn the hotel technician. At least a half an hour later I had to once again call reception who immediately sent a technician up to replace the faulty modem, only to find that the connection still didn’t work. After all of that, they gave me a room change where everything worked perfectly. How much time/effort/money do you think that cost the hotel?

For some of our non-hotel industry readers this may come as a surprise but High Definition is finally entering the hotel room on a large scale. The largest roll out currently underway is in the UK with one Group deploying HD in over 10,000 rooms. The hotel industry has been a keen promoter of proven technology hanging on to CRTs and analogue TV for as long as possible. The move to LCDs and HD, it was hoped, would put an end to the array of scathing comments in the guest complaint cards about snow on the TV and televisions the size of postage stamps. Adding LCDs and HD to hotel rooms has not only been saving considerable paper (for the guest comments) but it's been increasing usage of the TV screens as well as VoD with dramatic revenue growth for hotels. Just as Acentic expected. What we hadn’t expected was the increase in room service demands, which can be linked to the introduction of  the new HD systems. It seems that people are hanging out in their rooms more often these days to catch up on high definition television and movies and what goes better with that than late night cheeseburgers? Our apologies to the hotel chefs who have seen their work load increase. If we add our High Speed Internet Access platform and mobile applications, which are now enabling guests to roam within the hotel with their mobile devices, it’s not just in-room dining that will have increased.