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• 22-Apr-2010 by Benjamin Schwarz
• The future of the TV interface
• Videonet's Top Blogs

In the 90’s, I spent many unsuccessful sessions trying to teach my now 73-year-old mother, who often proofreads my writing (hi Mum), how to set a video recorder. Last Christmas, she left us eating supper to set the Sky+ box to record two simultaneous programs; she was back at the table within a minute. Something must have changed. If it wasn’t the Christmas wine, that change must have been the Sky+ box. The idea in this series is to understand the perspective of one key stakeholder on where TV interfaces have got to and where they might go.

I’ve always considered that the real challenge in getting good TV interfaces was in the B2C world. But this time, for a change, I started this quest with a discussion with someone who builds and sells IPTV systems to other businesses.

Alistair Forbes is the chief executive of Acentic, which supplies up-market hotels with TV solutions. When I told him of my mother’s Christmas dinner feats, he responded that even if it’s a bit dated, Sky’s interface is incredibly simple. From afar it seems to have barely changed in years, in spite of all its new functionality. Sky must live in fear of changing an interface that must work alike for 12-year olds and 90-year olds.

I challenged Forbes’s legitimacy in this area of end-user friendliness as hotel managers, not the people that actually use the TV service, pay his company’s bills. He agreed Acentic is in a different field from Sky, but points out that they have to deliver new features much faster (I’m not sure Sky would agree here). He went on to say, “Sure hotel managers count, but 80% of our business comes from the franchises.”

In such cases, year-long negotiations with the CEO will typically be for 10,000 rooms in multiple sites and the user interface will form a central part of discussions. Of over 10 million active hotel rooms in the world, about a quarter are 4 stars or more. There are about one million hotel rooms under various stages of construction throughout the word (Source: Smith Travel Research 2009, STR Global).

I’ve been in dozens of hotel rooms but they all have had different TV services. That’s when I understood Acentic’s mission is in some way much harder then Sky’s. When you have a Sky+ box it can take a household possibly a few months before everyone is happy with the PVR concept. Hotel visitors don’t know what is available through the TV in the room. The service must be enticing with a real call to attention; of course it must be pretty simple too.

I’ve been in too many hotel rooms with terrible TV services to accept this is always the case, so I pushed Alistair further on how Acentic can stay focussed on the end-user.

Acentic has eight designers across Europe to tailor the interface to be local, national and across brand. Again, great similarities with the big TV operators like Sky or Canal Plus for whom the brand is a central part of the user experience. Sky is pretty successful because after that Christmas supper episode, the ensuing discussion was about Sky delighting my mother rather than Channel 4 or wherever the content actually came from.

For example, a typical user interface challenge for Acentic is the French Marriot on the Champs Elysées, where for half the year the majority of guests are from the US, but for the other half, clientele is more middle-eastern, with always about 20% of Europeans throughout the year.

Acentic’s response to that kind of challenge has been to create an international TV line-up, in such a way that, for example, Arab visitors can select the Arabic package and thereafter P+/P- will navigate within Arabic channels. Guests can also choose an interface language, which hotel staff can set up in advance. The Paris Marriot has different requirements from those of London or Berlin.

Alistair points out that “having to work with such a huge array of channels of such variety means we need to be a bit more creative.” Usually 40 to 80 channels make up the default guest mix working with P+/P- without changing anything. Then there are 500+ extra “international TV” channels as well as the 250 or so movies (block buster and adult).

Acentic told me that most hotel managers don’t actually know what people use (e.g. CNN v. BBC world). That sounds familiar with Telco TV. Is this a new opportunity for the monitoring vendors?

The chronology of film rights is a key asset for hotels that only need to wait three months after theatrical release of a movie before offering it to guests (airlines wait one month, DVD rental waits six and Pay TV operators like Sky wait 12 months).

Acentic offers laptop connectivity as part of the package. This bundling is of interest to all operators as almost all now have more than just TV to sell.

Where services are bundled, i.e. you can buy a single package with both TV content and Wifi access, hotels see a 22% uplift in the overall usage (bundling is also a clever way to get movies onto business expenses). This kind of ratio would make a good target for incumbent operators when bundling combinations of fixed line, mobile, Internet and TV.

I pressed Alistair for some real usage figures and learnt that from a base of 200,000 rooms in March 2010, the TV was used by 7% to view the bill, by 8% to view hotel information, by 10% to see TV channel lists and finally by 12% for wake-up. To interpret how good these encouraging figures really are we’ll need to revisit this in a few months to see the trends. Maybe you can give us an update for IBC Alistair?

As I was with a specialist, I asked why, below 3 stars, hotels invariably have free Wifi whereas anything above charges through the roof. “Below 3 star service is free to increase occupancy. This is not true above 3 star, but the business models are ready to switch to free-to-guest if that turns out to be the way forward.”

Hmm, so the answer is that it’s a case of charging as long as they’ll pay, nothing to do with cost. The good news is that as income from laptop connectivity is considered at a peak, with a market getting sliced and diced, some nice hotels are bound to go free to guests.

I then asked Alistair for his perspective on the future of the TV interface starting with Social TV. In his crystal ball, he sees the world of Internet and that of TV both growing, but not necessarily together.

The world of TV channels is making a profitable transition to the web, but the opposite is not true. He doesn’t believe people are going to be sitting up in bed to interact with loved ones at home about the football match both are watching together any time soon. Skype will, however, become more prevalent in hotel rooms. Acentic’s view is that PDAs are becoming so smart that the senior executives that occupy hotel rooms will no longer always carry a laptop.

Looking more generally at the whole user experience (academics now call it UX), improvements will enable quicker and easier access to all of those choices we discussed above, so in the end better interfaces will drive ARPU.

On a more technical note (sorry Mum, can’t help this bit) introducing Flash 10 support will enable a true in-room gaming experience. Acentic’s architecture is based on a thin client (“a dumb display with just a bit of GUI”) implemented as a card integrated in the TVs.

As for 3D & other new technologies, well, Acentic doesn’t see hotels as labs. “They need a safe pair of hands.” Disruptive technologies will have to be prevalent in households first. Forbes finished with an interesting observation that goes against the grain of the delinearization mantra. For him TV user interfaces remain number driven rather than point and click or touch screen based.

He said yes to my closing question about whether interfaces should eventually disappear as a concept. When they get really, really good it’s just the user interacting with content. Hey, Alistair, maybe that’s one reason why the iPad might be truly revolutionary. What would my mother achieve with one of those in the living room?

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