On-demand TV channel services for hotels: Locatel and Anevia join forces

This new cloud-based television solution gives hotels an unlimited choice of channels with multi-screen services, while reducing costs
LOCATEL and Anevia, leading providers of communications and entertainment systems for hotels, are combining their expertise to reach new heights of quality in in-room television service - at a lower cost.

Locatel's new Eclipse Cloud TV service, powered by Anevia CloudTV for Hospitality, is also fully compatible with Locatel's recently introduced mobile solutions.

All TV channels, at any time
High-end hotels in the EMEA region often broadcast more than a hundred TV channels in order to meet the needs of different nationalities, content preferences and the growing expectations of their guests.

Until now, these types of services required complex and expensive equipment - headends fed by multiple antennas, satellite dishes and cabling - which had to be installed and maintained on the hotel premises. In addition to being costly, changing or adding channels in such an environment often involves service interruptions.

Locatel's Eclipse Cloud TV, the new in-room television innovation, is powered by Anevia CloudTV for Hospitality. This innovative system enables hotels to add or change their subscribed TV channels with a simple click, at any time and as often as they wish. All TV content is aggregated and managed in a remote data center and delivered to the hotel via a single fiber-optic cable.

If a foreign delegation temporarily wants a new set of channels - or if a sporting event needs to be broadcast on a specific date - the technical work that used to be costly is now a thing of the past. Moreover, Anevia CloudTV is based on highly advanced adaptive bit rate streaming technology, which gives guests faster service when channel surfing and requesting content.

This cutting-edge technology optimizes bandwidth use in order to respond to guests' requests faster and eliminate freezing and pixelation on the screen.

?Eclipse Cloud TV is the service our hotel customers have been looking for for years. This solution fits perfectly with our strategy of accelerating innovation in hospitality with hosted, flexible services,? explains Antoine Trannoy, Chief Technical Officer at LOCATEL.

?Eclipse Cloud TV complements our portfolio of hosted solutions such as connected TV and Internet access products, not to mention our new range of mobile information and entertainment solutions that we have just launched.

Hotels can now focus on their core business, while we deliver the turnkey communication and information systems they need in order to offer their guests the best possible quality, choice and mobility.?

?We introduced this new service on the famous Flamingo, our suite of modular IPTV headends for the Hospitality sector, in order to accelerate innovation for our customers,? adds Damien Lucas, Vice President and co-founder of Anevia. ?To access an ever-growing number of channels, what they need is a cloud-based headend that leverages Flamingo on site to deliver those channels. So we are very proud to team up with Locatel's management solutions, middleware and mobility systems to offer this cloud-based TV delivery service.

It is an industry first. Together, we have created a winning combination for our hospitality customers: unlimited TV channels based on a flexible model for hotels that makes long-term contractual commitments redundant.?
The first LOCATEL Eclipse Cloud TV deployments will be announced in the coming weeks.

Further deployments will follow across the Middle East at the beginning of 2014.