LG East Africa is positioning itself to attract corporate clients with its integrated TV sets that come with inbuilt digital signal receivers as the country gears up to migrate from analogue broacasting. LG East African director Josep Kim said that with the new set, hotels will not need set top boxes.
Mr. Kim said there was need for players in the tourism industry to come together and share insights on the hospitality, technology innovations which can be integrated into hotels to reduce total cost of ownership and enhance environmental corporate responsibility as well as hotel services and standards. “Our LG Pro: Centric technology offers all customizable tools that help hoteliers optimize the hotel TV with IP based programmes; web kit and html 5. This will help the industry save big on the expenses of managing the hotel TVs,” he said.
The technology provides 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. The LG TV equally comes with Pro:Idiom, a digital content protection system tailored for the hospitality industry. Pay TV providers will not supply content to hoteliers without a digital rights management system. The range of smart TVs function such as Smart share and WiDi would revolutionalize commercialized connectivity and enable guests to play and view content from their digital devices on their in-room TVs, added Mr. Kim. “While with other TVs, hoteliers end up spending a one off costs of Ksh 2.2 million to acquire an encryption server and about Ksh 2000 annual fee for each TV set, the LG hotel TV comes with a built in Digital content protection system,” he said.
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 using Pro:Idiom which is inbuilt only on the LG hotel TVs. Pro:Idiom is widely used in hospitality environment and is quickly becoming a standard feature for hospitality television. It is estimated that at least 4 million analogue TV sets will have to be connected to set top boxes in order to receive the digital signal. Presently, less than 10% of TV owners have acquired the digital TV set top boxes needed to watch digital television.
