eTV hotel TV system

While I was away at a wedding this last week I had a chance to observe a rather fancy hotel room TV service at the Future Inn in Cardiff Bay. This system isn't your ordinary low grade 14" portable with some badly tuned in satellite channels and maybe an "information channel", this was a super fancy system called eTV. This eTV system appears to be a standard PC running inside a Fujitsu Siemens specialised multimedia case. The case had SCART sockets as well as your usual monitor outputs, there appeared to be a network card and some RCA audio connectors as well. Connected to this case was an infrared receiver for the supplied remote control and keyboard. The video output went to what appears to be a standard 19" or larger Sony LCD monitor and some Logic 3 speakers were mounted under the desk to provide the audio output. The specialised computer case I mentioned had 4 directional buttons on the right hand side plus an "ok" button in the middle, there was also a green backlit 20x2 LCD panel in the centre of the front panel, along with a DVD drive above it. The case itself is quite large for a media PC, it's larger than a typical VCR though smaller than the average home cinema amplifier.

The computer itself can be turned on from the remote and therefore doesn't require user to push any button on the case itself to get started. After passing by what appeared to be the BIOS start up a loading screen then appeared before what appeared to be evidence of X windows starting since I say a gray chequered background and a black cross briefly before the eTV interface came up. At this point I could tell that the box was probably running Linux, this was only further confirmed when I right clicked at one point to see a pop up menu that was definitely not Windows or Mac styled. The interface itself seemed to be well presented and easy to use, I felt very comfortable using it and I think a lot of thought has gone into it. The interface is divided into 4 colour coded areas: TV, Internet, Mail and Music.

From the TV section I could watch a selection of UK TV channels which appeared to be the standard Freeview selection. The TV section also gave access to pay per view movies all of which had an image, along with a synopsis of the film and a viewing cost of £5.95 each. The Internet section provided access to a built in web browser that you navigated with the supplied keyboard which also had mouse functionality integrated, I found the mouse a bit clumsy to use but the web browser seemed perfectly functional to me. The Internet section also offered Internet games, these appeared to be fairly standard Flash based games such as a Puzzle Bubble clone and other simple games, I did find it slightly annoying that I couldn't use the remote to play these games.

The mail section seemed to you access to a range of e-mail services, I didn't really touch these but they seemed to cover web mail and standard mail. Finally there is the music section which I found the most impressive and developed. From the music section you can play an audio CD, access a worldwide selection of Internet radio stations and play a selection of stored CD albums of which a good variety of artists and genres were covered. The audio playback appeared to be powered by the Helix DNA system for the album playback and Internet radio however I did notice the album playback could be a bit problematic.

My thoughts are that the eTV system is essentially a customised Linux distro which runs X with a main application providing all the UI. Because there appears to be no aerial I assume there is a central computer in the hotel that provides all the data such as TV channels as well as the music which is then pushed to these client devices in the hotel rooms. I think the system is impressive and certainly a step in the right direction for hotel systems and the system is not unlike the media server stuff I wrote while at University which I had actually envisioned its use in a hotel in a similar way to this system. This is certainly a system to keep an eye on and I think it's a good example of a well implemented media client/server system.