Choosing commercial television for a hotel or compound

Television in a hotel, lodge, compound or staff accommodation looks like a small decision until the first invoice, the first outage or the first letter about licensing. It is worth getting right at the start, and the decisions are fewer than they appear.

First, the question everybody gets wrong

A residential television subscription does not license commercial or public viewing. Using a home subscription in guest rooms, a bar, a reception area or staff accommodation is a breach of the subscription terms and of the content licensing behind them.

The exposure sits with the business, not with whoever installed it. This is the single most common finding when we survey an existing installation, and it is almost never deliberate; somebody set up what they had, the property grew, and nobody revisited it.

A commercial subscription licenses the viewing your premises actually does. It also comes with a commercial support relationship, which matters when a system serving sixty rooms fails on a Friday night.

And the one people get wrong second

Pirate services and cloned decoders are cheap and openly available in some markets. They are a poor trade for a business, and not principally for ethical reasons.

• Modified decoder software and streaming applications of unknown origin are a documented malware route, and you are installing them on equipment inside the network your guests use
• There is no support line, no service level and no engineer when the stream drops during a match
• The supplier is unlicensed, which means it is accountable to no regulator and to you least of all

A guest whose room television fails complains to you. That is the whole argument.

Which package suits which premises

Commercial packages are structured around what the premises is, not around budget. Getting this right is most of the decision.

Sites with more than one character need more than one package. A compound with staff accommodation, a canteen and an office is genuinely three environments, and pretending otherwise produces either overspend or complaints.

The part that costs more than the subscription

Distribution. One signal has to reach many rooms, and how that is done determines both the installed cost and how much trouble the system gives you afterwards.

A master antenna television system takes a central source and distributes it through a single cabled network to every outlet. One headend, one dish array, one set of amplifiers. The alternative (a decoder and a dish per room) is cheaper for four rooms and absurd for forty, and it puts equipment in guest rooms where guests will reconfigure it.

Two practical points. Existing cabling can frequently be reused, and cabling is usually the expensive part, so a survey before quotation genuinely saves money. And distribution design is where in-room quality problems come from: signal level, splitter losses and amplification determine whether room 412 at the end of the run looks like room 101.

Channel counts, and why they move

Package comparisons usually come down to channel counts, and they are the least reliable basis for a decision.

Counts are approximate and they change: broadcasters add and remove channels, rights move between platforms, and the operator reserves the right to adjust the line-up. A package that had a particular sports channel last season may not this season, and that is normal rather than a failure.

What matters for a hospitality or compound buyer is not the total but whether the specific things your audience actually watches are in the package, usually a handful of sports, news and general entertainment channels, plus language coverage appropriate to your guests or staff. Ask for the current channel list for the specific package and check it against that shortlist. It takes ten minutes and it is the only comparison that predicts satisfaction.

Add-ons, and the one worth understanding

Packages can be extended. News, language and regional add-ons are inexpensive and are the usual way to tailor a system to a particular staff or guest population.

The one worth understanding properly is ExtraView, which allows a second viewing point on the same subscription rather than requiring a second subscription. For a compound with a communal area as well as accommodation, or a property with a public bar and guest rooms, it frequently changes the arithmetic. Ask about it specifically, because it is rarely volunteered.

Working out what it should cost

The number that matters is cost per room per month, and it has three components: the subscription, the amortised installation, and the support arrangement. A cheap subscription attached to a badly designed distribution system is not cheap; it is a maintenance liability with a low headline rate.

Ask any supplier for all three. A quotation that gives you only the subscription is not a quotation.

A short checklist before you buy

• How many rooms or viewing points, now and after the next expansion?
• What is the premises actually for: sleeping, drinking, working, living?
• Is there existing cabling, and has anyone surveyed it?
• Who supports it, from where, and how quickly?
• Is the subscription commercial, and is that in writing?

Five questions. Most bad television installations fail at least three of them, and they fail them before anything is switched on.

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