The Fairmont Hotel Dubai Upgrade Project
Alex Asewando, Head of R&D, Neos Interactive. July 2008

The Fairmont Hotel Dubai was due for a major Neos Interactive system upgrade in July 2008. The hotel has been working very closely with Neos since the first system was installed at the hotel in 2004. The hotel has been receiving minor upgrades on a regular basis throughout. The hotel was modernising its IT infrastructure and consulted Neos to help select a modern TV and set top boxes to be used for the upgrade. The hotel faced the following upgrade issues:

1. Replacement of all old Grundig TVs as they were so out of date with the hotel's vision of an in-room TV solution.
2. Replacement of some of its set top boxes as many had reached the end of useful life.
3. Replacement of its graphics and imagery to comply with new branding standards.
4. Upgrade the system without downtime as the hotel occupancy rate was very high.
5. Addition of new in-room features that the guests have requested.

The Neos Interactive system is capable of interfacing with a host of TVs. The TV source is also varied, from a pc-based TV card, using a built-in TV tuner to IPTV. IPTV produces the best TV picture quality and can be displayed in almost any type of TV as long as the TV has has automatic power management features or can respond to power off and power on command from the pc via a communication link between the pc and the TV.

The hotel TV source is analogue via coaxial cables. The hotel used TV cards in the set top boxes to display TV pictures. In terms of picture quality, these pc-based cards produce an inferior TV picture compared with a good built-in analogue TV tuner, so faced with the above choices, the hotel opted for a TV with a good TV tuner that can be controlled from the set top box using interactive TV commands. This means that the guests can now view TV as displayed from the TV's own tuner. Many TV companies now offer hotel interactive TVs, so from a picture quality, price and full interactive command features perspective the LG hotel HIZ22 TV was selected. It had the advantage in that its TV interactive commands were built-in and were easy to integrate into the Neos architecture within a short period. Future TV software upgrades can also be done using software downloaded on the set top box. The TV is able to respond to command from a dedicated Neos remote control and keyboard. The user is able to use the Neos remote control to change channels, switch between full screen TV and TV preview, change volume, power the TV on and set it to standby mode, etc. The system is able to remember the users last TV channel, so even if the set top box is restarted or set into standby, the user is able to go to the last TV channel that was watched.

The hotel was using very old Aloha set top boxes and these were replaced with modern HP small form factor pcs. The challenge was that over the years the hotel had bought four other types of pcs and all needed to work seamlessly with each other. This means that the upgrade required five separate software images to be created and installed, one for each pc type. The Grundig TV was displaying pictures in low resolution and it had incompatible cable connections. The hotel purchased enough serial communication cables to be connected between the pc and the new TV. The TV is able to acknowledge each command it receives and is also able to provide the status of many features. Audio came from the TV speakers which provide pseudo-surround sound capability. In many rooms the TV also provided access to external speakers including bathroom speakers. This means that the guest can listen to their favourite music tracks, radio channels or TV newscasts in the bathroom and be able to control the volume levels at this location. Volume can also be controlled from connected amplifiers wherever these are installed.

The hotel also requested many features to its in-room entertainment system, including the ability to:
1. Support auxiliary TV ports (AV1, AV2, S-Video, HDMI, Component Video) so that other devices e.g. video games consoles, iPOD and other docking stations can easily be plugged into the TV without losing the interactive nature of the Neos system.
2. Lock and unlock features such as the TV panel control, IR control, and other child lock features.
3. Picture-in-Picture functionality so that the user is able to view TV in a small screen and select channels from the TV listing.
4. Play mp3 files from an external media such as CD.
5. Change the aspect ratio in full screen TV as some TV channels may display in an aspect ratio that is not the default one for the TV. The TV is set to display in 16:9 aspect and the TV channel may display in 4:3, so we neede to change it to display widescreen.
6. Support DVD playback with variable playrates, closed captions and sub-titles. The ability to fast-forward and rewind at different rates give the user a fine control over the DVD navigation. The ability to pause and view the DVD chapters means that the user can watch any part of the DVD at any time.
7. Ensure that hotel engineers can re-image the pc via the recently upgraded high capacity fibre network using images stored on the server. As a backup feature, the images are also available on bootable DVDs.

The upgrade project had to deal with offering services to both the existing and new systems without loss of services. In order to upgrade the system without downtime, new web-sites were created on the servers to serve the web pages to the new in-room client images. The database was also structured to be fully backwardly compatible with the new clients. The servers provide access to the huge music and video content and full playback functionality needed to be retained.

The Neos Creative team worked closely with the hotel Marketing & PR team to provide new high resolution graphics to be used to transform the new user interface. This gave a complete transformation from an old low resolution 4:3 enabled Grundig TV to a very high resolution 16:9 LG full interactive hotel TV.

From initial preparation in London, through to on-site implementation and deployment, the upgrade was perfomed seamlessly with little or no disruption to the hotel or guest.