TV for guests from all over the world — without buying 2,000 channels for every hotel
A hotel chain in Cyprus gathers around 2,000 channels in a single data centre and pulls a channel into the hotel on the fly — at the moment a guest switches it on in the room.
Our client
Company
A hotel chain in Cyprus
Industry
Hospitality / hotel TV
The problem
Guests arrive from every corner of the world, and each of them wants the channels of their own country. Across the whole audience that adds up to around 2,000 channels. Buying that entire list for every hotel and feeding it into every site is impossible — neither financially nor technically: a small hotel simply has nowhere to take two thousand channels. Until this was solved, TV at that kind of reach did not exist in the chain at all.
Key results
- •Around 2,000 channels are available to a guest in any hotel of the chain — without buying the whole list for every site
- •A channel reaches the hotel only once it has actually been switched on in a room
- •The archive is kept centrally; catch-up works on the channels where the rights allow it
- •Reporting to content providers is built on Catena's own statistics
- •TV for guests from all over the world became possible in this chain at all
About the project
The client's goal
Give a guest from anywhere in the world the television of their own country in the hotel room — and do it so that the economics of the chain still work. The usual hotel-TV approach, feeding the entire channel package into every hotel, breaks at the first step here: the wider the geography of the guests, the longer the channel list, and it has to be paid for at every site separately.
Our solution
The chain built the service on Catena. Feeds are taken from the content providers and gathered in one central data centre, where the archive is kept as well. The hotel does not hold the whole channel list: when a guest checks into a room and switches a channel on, that channel starts being pulled into the hotel on the fly. If the guest needs catch-up or rewind — on the channels where the rights allow it — the request goes to the central archive.
The viewing statistics Catena keeps are the basis for reporting to the content providers: who watched and how much is counted from actual viewing.
Results
Key achievements
- •The channel list is no longer tied to the site: a guest in any hotel of the chain reaches around 2,000 channels, although no single hotel receives them all
- •The load on a hotel's link is driven by what is actually being watched, not by the length of the list
- •The archive and the catch-up rights live in one place — the central data centre, not in every hotel
- •Reporting to content providers rests on the platform's own statistics
"The conversation about television always ran into the channel list: our guests want dozens of countries, and a list like that cannot be fed into every hotel. Now a guest switches their own channel on in the room, and we do not have to hold it in all the hotels at once." — Technical director, hotel chain in Cyprus
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