HOTENSIFY TAKES SHANGRI-LA THE SHARD TO NEW HEIGHTS WITH PREMIUM VIEWING TECHNOLOGY!!
The Shangri-La Hotel at The Shard stands as a beacon of luxury and innovation in the heart of London. Located within Europe’s tallest building, it offers an unforgettable experience with sweeping panoramic views, world-class amenities, and exceptional service. This iconic hotel redefines modern hospitality, blending elegance with cutting-edge design to create an extraordinary stay.
During a project to upgrade the Hotel’s Wired and Wireless Guest internet provision using HPE Aruba Networking hardware who delivered Guest Wi-Fi throughout the property, Hotensify were contacted by VikrusIT to see if we could help modernise channel delivery to 207 TV’s across all hotel bedrooms and suites .
Working alongside VikrusIT and UK Connect Ltd, Hotensify embarked on a long consultation period to ascertain the best sources of channels from across the world and the best, most secure solution to deliver them in crystal clear quality to the hotel rooms and suites just as the content producer originally intended.
As a Sky Business partner, Hotensify recommended the Sky Select hardware to receive Sky Movies, Sports and more in Full HD quality. The received content was in turn encrypted using Pro:Idiom encryption for safe delivery to the new LG TV’s deployed on site using IPTV. Playing out the content with encryption applied ensures that the hotel is fully compliant with the terms and conditions of displaying premium content in the hotel set by broadcasters and ensures the content is copyright protected and that the hotels exposure to content tampering or digital rights abuse is minimised.
Additionally, Hotensify deployed a compact digital headend from Televes fed by the Astra 28.2, Astra 19.2, Hotbird 13.0 and other satellites as well as a ‘Freeview’ feed that was fed down one of the blown fibres feeding the comms room that was not being utilised in the hotel.
Several Chinese channels were brought in from the internet and introduced into the system using Televes HDMI encoders, as well as the Shangri-La in house promotional channels being played out on the system.
The work was all performed concurrently with the existing Co-Ax infrastructure left in place so that both the old and the new system could be left in place and kept running at the same time, allowing the roll out of new TV’s to take place over some time .
Anthony Tizzard, Managing Director at Hotensify said: “The origin and volume of different channels requested by this client made this one of the most complex channel delivery projects I have ever worked on, but the installation went very smoothly in the end, and we have a super high quality result in the guest rooms that really uplifts the TV offering. The ability of the Sky Select unit really is astonishing too, with its fully redundant hot swappable power supplies and it’s ability to reprofile TV services from Satellite , Terrestrial or digital media file on the fly.”