LG East Africa is positioning itself to attract corporate clients with its integrated digital TVs that come with inbuilt digital signal receivers by capitalising on the mandatory analogue-to-digital migration.
Speaking to hotel chain owners, TV distributors and other players in the hospitality industry, Mr Josep Kim, the LG East Africa Director said hotels will not need Set-Top Boxes if they embrace LG’s cost-saving commercial TV management solution.
Mr Kim said there was need for players in the tourism industry to come together and share insights on hospitality technology innovations which can be integrated into hotels to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and enhance environmental corporate responsibility and well as a hotel’s services and standards.
“Our LG Pro: Centric Technology offers all customisable tools that help hoteliers optimize the Hotel TV with IP based programs; web kit and HTML5,” said Mr Kim.
He said the LG’s unique technology—Set-Top Box integrated solution— will help the industry “save big” on the expenses of managing the hotel TVs.
The global electronics manufacturer said the technology comes with the ability to provide premium hotel services without the need for a set-top box, while enhancing connectivity and display sharing available to guests with LG Smart TV technology.
LG TV equally comes with Pro:Idiom, a digital content protection system tailored for the hospitability industry. “Pay TV providers will not supply content to hoteliers without a digital rights management system,” says Mr Kim.
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Although content protection was not a predominant issue during the analog era, as hotels move towards HD, digital rights management is a requirement in the transition process.
While with other TVs hoteliers end up spending a one-off cost of KSh2.2 million to acquire an encryption server and about KSh2000 annual fee for each TV set, the LG Hotel TV comes with a built-in a digital content protection system.
It allows a central server in a hotel to encrypt video from a satellite feed and encode it for secure delivery to TV sets in each room and using Pro:Idiom which is in-built only on the LG Hotel TVs, the content is decrypted. Pro:Idiom is widely used in hospitality environments and is quickly becoming a standard feature for hospitality television.
Mr Kim said their range of Smart TV functions such as Smart Share and WiDi would revolutionalise commercialised connectivity and enable guests to play and view content from their digital devices on their in-room TVs.
“Besides savings for hotel chains, guests can enjoy a greater variety of applications and services. With this you’ll never have to worry about issues or lack of service capacity,” said Mr Kim.
It is estimated that at least four million analogue TV sets in the country will have to be connected to set-top boxes in order to receive the digital signal. Presently, less than 10 percent of TV-owners have acquired the digital TV set-top boxes needed to watch digital television.
The analogue-to-digital shift was conventionally agreed upon at the Radio Communication Conference (RCC) held in Geneva, Switszerland under the sponsorship of the International Telecommunications Union in May 2006.
The global digital migration cutover date is set for June 2015 but, locally, the government ambitiously backdated the deadline to June 2013.
