Adoption of smartphones and other personal connected devices such as tablets are soaring in all corners of the world, but nowhere more so than in Asia, where Nielsen sets the interest in buying one in the next 12 months at a whopping 50%. The question now seems to be not when people will buy such a device, for that seems to be inevitable, but what they’re most likely use it for.
Early usage patterns show that smart device users tend to consume twice as much media as others and according to In-Stat, 86% of them are using them to watch video. Savvy hoteliers should take note of these figures as they give valuable insights to their guests’ preferences and provide an opportunity to offer powerful value added services.
Most higher-starred hotels around the world have launched smartphone and tablet-specific applications that mainly offer booking functions, facility information and guest services, but precious few offer what guests probably most likely want while staying at a hotel, which appears to be video content, if statistics are to be believed.
There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, most vendors who offer tablet applications or hospitality-specific video solutions haven’t got the technical capabilities to offer such a service. To be able to offer video services for tablets or second screens, particularly live video, requires a vendor to own or be part of the whole IPTV ecosystem within the hotel, which is only possible with a thorough understanding of Walled Garden IPTV, Mobile TV and Broadcast TV, and years of working experience with service provider platforms. This is something not easily achieved which is why most vendors in the market today are merely able to provide a hotel web portal for tablets, rather than fully fledged video services.
Secondly, the fact that offering these services within the hotel requires essentially a telco-grade solution has created the perception that it must be complicated and expensive to deploy.
But this is actually not the case. Yes, for second screen video services hotels need a robust IPTV-based video platform, with cost effective encoding and transcoding capabilities in the headend, as well as a carefully deployed network of wireless access points throughout the hotel (or at least in those areas hotels want guests to do so, which may not include the Michelin-starred restaurant). But this type of solution may be more affordable than many hoteliers think, as a lot of telco-grade equipment to which this type of streaming capability was traditionally restricted, has now been re-engineered for the enterprise world with a suitable price tag to match (offered, for example, by MVI Systems). So for hoteliers it would certainly pay to shop around and ask the right questions when choosing their IT technology partner.
While mobile operators today are able to offer reasonable quality TV and video services on regular smartphones, they are still a long way away from being able to offer high quality mobile video on a tablet or even a mobile phone with a larger screen, due to bandwidth constraints. Even with the imminent roll out of LTE technology in many countries within Asia it will take years for operators to be able to develop anything that resembles a fully fledged, stable and reliable big screen mobile TV service. Large screens, by the way, are a major trend for smartphones according to researcher Mintel, which found that 27% of survey respondents wished their phone screens were larger and that the 4″ smartphone screen is quickly becoming standard.
So hotels have a real opportunity here to wow their guests with a unique technology application that not even a mobile operator can offer.
