"HDTV" in hotels, hospitals, etc? - Page 3

I was in a Sheraton last night at the Cincinnati airport in which the rooms had HD on an LG LCD (I am going to say 32"). It had all 4 network affiliates, HDNet, Universal HD, Discovery HD, ESPN and ESPN2HD.
The hotel restaurant/bar had a 60" LG on which the Ohio State/Penn State game was airing. Looked fabulous.

I went to the Hummingbird Hotel in Ojai, CA a week ago. I was pleased to discover that they had a 32" Vizio LCD atached to the wall. When I turned it on it was stretched. Since I have a Vizio at home I knew how to turn that off easily. Then I went on a quest for a HD channel. It was apparently hooked to the local cable system. Channel changing took 5-10 seconds so hunting was not an easy job. However I found the HD channels and watched the local (Los Angeles actually) HD channels. I was happy.

I also noticed all the bars and resturants in my home town of Simi Valley, CA have widescreen TVs with stretched SD. I found one resturant/sports bar last night that had both widescreen HDTVs showing HD and 4x3 SD TVs that were showing SD that were in sync even. They had two walls of widescreen HDTVs and one wall of SD TVs. However they had one wall with two huge projection widescreens that were showing SD stretched. Oh well, three out of four isn't bad. (It was Yankee Doodles on Tapo St and Alamo for any locals.)

Rick R

I'm staying at the Shinjuku Prince Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. It's a "first class hotel", meaning it's between a business class and a deluxe hotel. It's a very small room, but it does have one of those fancy toilets and a small 26" or less LCD HDTV. And high-speed Internet access for $5 a night. All this for $134 a night plus taxes.

They have all the OTA digital channels set up on the TV, and most of the programming is in HD. Having said that, the Japanese have to be wondering why they bothered to invent this technology. So far, I've seen mostly talking head shows, news programs, educational programs, sports highlights, and an occasional nature show. They seem to have lots and lots of cooking shows. I came across a CSI:Miami rerun in HD, a Japanese drama, and a special Japanese pro baseball game. They seem to have a lot of shows with B-List Japanese celebs doing goofy stuff and yelling obnoxiously. Finally, they have the late night - early morning infomercials, sometimes ripped right off of American TV and dubbed in Japanese.

Ok, it's probably a function of the times I am actually in the hotel sampling stuff. However, the point is most of this programming is in actual HD, whereas most of the same type of programming in the US is still in SD.

I made a list of the channels this TV is set up to receive:

1 D 011 NHK G
2 D 021 NHK E
4 D 041 Tokyo TV
6 D 061 TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System)
8 D 081 Fuji
5 D 051 TV Asahi
7 D 071 TV Tokyo
9 D 091 Tokyo MX

Oh well, I'm off to the Fuji TV tour today, and doing the NHK tour tomorrow. Tokyo Motor Show later this week.

Geez, I was in Vegas last week and all I saw was two hookers passed out in the hallway in front of my room...

[Guess ya' need to spend more than $160/night for a room in that freakish town]

I'm staying at the Royal Lahaina Resort on Maui and they have 32 inch LG LCDs in the rooms with HD PPV movies available as well as ESPN/2 HD, HBOHD, HDNET, HDNET Movies and Universal HD.

I mentioned to the front desk how happy I was to stay in a hotel that actually had HD on their HDTV's, and they said they just revamped all of the rooms and upgraded the TVs and the hotel TV system.

Well Done!

What drives me nuts are the brand new fancy hotels built within the last year or two that have widescreen TVs in every room but are still displaying analog and stretched SD. There's no excuse for this.

The only hotel I have stayed at that had HD sets in the rooms is the Crown Plaza in San Jose. Nothing but analog stretchovision! I have been to many casinos in Las Vegas and Indian casinos in California, as well as bars and restaurants with HD sets, and I have NEVER seen high definition in any of them! The poker room here in Bakersfield recently had a major renovation and got a lot of HD sets. They are always showing stretchovision analog, mostly ESPN 1 or 2 or Fox Sports West. They use Bright House cable, the same as I have at home. The tv's have QAM tuners (I saw some of the boxes they came in once), so they could get the local channels in HD, but I suppose they are just so used to NBC being "cable 3" and don't know what channel 43-1 is! Of course Bright House scrambles all digital channels except the local HD channels, and all their product literature and their website say that a subscription to "digital cable" and an HD converter are required to receive any HD channels.

I think that when analog broadcasting ends, that more hotels and public places will be showing real high definition from local channels, and when analog cable ends they will be showing cable networks in high definition as well.

As far as I can remember in my (USA) travels, there's basically only two providers for hotel video systems - OnCommand and LodgeNet - and those guys have been really late to the HD game, IMO. There's a lot of set top boxes in a lot of hotel rooms (not to mention the hotel's "headend") that would need to be upgraded to get HD in every room.

The hotels had to be dragged kicking and screaming just to provide broadband internet connections in the rooms, so you can be sure they won't be so quick to upgrade the TV system to HD. With internet the hotel has some return on investment by charging the guest for internet access, and the business guest can get reimbursed by his company for that internet charge. On the other hand, nobody will be able to legitimately claim a business expense because they wanted to pay the hotel $10 a night to watch HD TV...

The W Hotel here in Dallas has I think 32" Samsung LCD's in each room. They had the OTA in HD but not anything else

A lot of hotels spent a lot of money wiring all their rooms for Internet only to see other hotels provide wireless Internet at a fraction of the cost a few years later. Providing wireless Internet costs so little, many hotels that have the wired Internet also provide wireless now.

The Embassy Suites in Waikiki, downtown Honolulu, that opened last January has two HDTV's in each suite. I stayed there the first week they were open - SD strechovision only.

Have you ever noticed that the cheaper end of the a chain's brands of hotels - Marriott is a good example - have free internet while its higher and top the the line hotels charge guests for the service?

I was in a furniture store yesterday that was showing an HD loop featuring HD Theater, HDNet, and a Tweeter promo.

Yes it's true - The Crowne Plaza Little Rock offers 32" flat screen televisions with high definition in all rooms. Simply amazing!

Mandalay Bay Las Vegas, 42" Philips plasma in the room. Appears to have all the local HDs, ESPN, ESPN2, MHD, MOJO, and some others via Cox cable. Very nice.

The 1080i channels show a lot of pixelation on fast motion, so either the hotel distribution system or Cox Las Vegas are doing some bandwidth shaping.

Channel changing is painfully slow waiting for the TV to lock into the QAM channels.

There's also a 15" 4:3 Philips "HD" TV on a wall mount in the bathroom, but only gets the standard hotel-issue SD analog channels.

Westin New York Times Square had 42" LG LCDs.

15 Digital Channels
Even the Westin ppv-preview/hotel services channel was shot in HD or high quality SD 16x9.

They had all the NYC local affiliates in HD, minus WNBC

ESPN
ESPN2
HDNet
Discovery
Universal

The return on investment for these things doesn't come from charging the guests more fees. It comes from being able to rent the room in the first place.

HDTVs are just one of many amenities hotels can use to attract business. Eventually it will be something all hotels have and just taken for granted. Remember when motels used to advertise "color TV"?

..or air conditioning...

From some of the descriptions, it appears as though a wise item to pack when traveling might be a compact indoor amplified antenna...

kenglish,

telehealth sold them the TV's but they didn't do the Intermountain Health Care head end. The company Inn Room Video did. I know this site first hand as I was the one who bid it and contracted all of the labor. If you want details on this site's set up, you can PM me.

Mike Dorsey
Operations Mgr
Inn Room Video

Brook Hollow Sheraton in Houston, TX

LG 32 LCD with 5 digital channels:
cbshd
nbshd
abchd
foxhd
hbohd

All analog channels are streeeetched

The Intercontinental Century City in Century City, CA (formerly the Park Hyatt, across the street from Fox Plaza, aka "Nakatomi Plaza" from Die Hard) has HD feeds to their HDTVs, but the system is so fragile that it was down for at least a few hours every day of my stay.

It was fragile enough that they were offering guests complimentary PPV when the system was up.

Interestingly enough, though the hotel can easily see Mt. Wilson, their local HDs (and in fact all signals) were from DISH Network - so they had ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox in HD, but not the local CW, KTLA.

They also had a few HD cable channels (ESPN HD, TNT HD, and UHD come to mind.)

I think the problem for the near future is that ATSC modulators are still very, very expensive so pricing is confiscatory for systems able to send HD signals to in-room TVs.

It''s trivial to send NTSC around so look for stretched SD cable channels to be the norm for quite some time to come.

As an alternate report, Bellagio Las Vegas has new in-room LCDs but still horrible analog cable. Of course they don't want you to spend time in your room, so that makes sense for them.

Of all channels, I was surprised to see CNN HD on the TV at a bar here in Washington, D.C. last night. I agree that things are getting better, though. It seems like the places with older widescreen LCDs are still doing SD, while places that have upgraded more recently are doing true HD.

Courtyard Inn, St. Charles IL,

LG 42 inch LCD HDTVs, but showing only analog channels, using those special boxes/converters to manage the movies and shows you buy in your room.

Total waste of a HDTV IMO.

Embassy Suites, Downtown Chicago, IL.
Rooms with tube TVs (analog of course) with their boxes to also control what you want to buy.
They had Plasmas on the Bar, but also analog programing, watched some NFL games in some bad upconvert from the system they had.

Hey I tried to get FTA channels on the room with LG LCD, but I didn't want to be kicked out of the room for trying to sabotage their TVs, but no, you can't even change the channel manually, it's like the TVs are specially locked from Factory to be in the AUX channel all the time!

Hilton Garden Inn-New Orleans French Quarter on Poydras.

32" Visio LCD with a COX HD box bolted to the back. However everything on it was stretched SD. Yeah.

My wife and I just came back from vacation where we were in 6 hotel/motels in 8 nights. None had HDTVs. Interestingly all had free wireless high speed internet. One of the wifi networks had a security scheme that mad it VERY difficult to use however.

The St. Marie in the New Orleans French Quarter, and was one of the nicest hotels we were in, had the smallest maybe 19" analog TV.

Rick R

I stayed at the Floridan on the Walt Disney World Resort and they did have HDTV in the hotel suite. We watched a 40" HDTV and it looked pretty good. Not bragging or anything but the rooms were $450 a night and it was very upscaled. The TV looked good and in true HD in a lot of the local and cale channels.

So, that "Commander" box on the back on the TVs prevent messing around with the channels? I see they are connected to a serial port or something like that, they seem to completely disable changing the channels and source of the TV.

I guess for my next trip I'll better get one of those USB HDTV tuners, oh which reminds me I had the laptop and also wanted to connect it to the VGA or HDMI in (I had the cables) on the TV, but since you couldn't select the video source I was frustraded and had to watch some DVD's in my 14" screen instead of a 42"

I hope hotel televisions will start letting people select HDMI sources. Most of the NTSC ones in hotels let you hook up composite and s-video cables because lot of people like to preview their videos when they're on vacation.

Atrium Medical Center - Middletown, OH (about 30 miles North of Cincinnati, it's a new facility opened Dec 2007, their old facility used SD cable feed from TWC, and 20~25 inch'ish DV-CRT's )

They had Most Dayton+Cincinnati HD broadcast stations in HD, they are apparently using Off air pickup as digital/HD stations and SD multicast services not available in the area via cable or DBS LiL in area are present -- These are apparently being remodulated to VHF channels with PSIP stripped, in most cases being received using internal 8VSB or QAM demods(I couldn't tell which) on the sets ...

3 of the 4 Cincinnati/Dayton PBS HD digital affiliates(all run different HD schedules), and TBN digital as well as Dayton CW HD affiliate aren't present from what I saw, but the other 10 current Cincy/Dayton digital/HD broadcast stations are, including CW SD via Cincinnati CBS station which multicasts the SD CW channel, and including the Cincy MyTV HD affiliate and one Cincy PBS HD member station(unfortunetly currently the one that has the least PBS HD out of the 4 as they only have it when live PBS HD channel programming "coincides" with their analog's schedule. And, CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox HD affilates from both markets were also present ....

Although, in the patient rooms, only a SD 480i multicast "subchannel" is apparently available from the Dayton NBC digital affiliate .. I expect this is related for "some reason" to the following : this station has it's streams set up so the PID(packet identifiers) for the SD subchannel for MPEG2 "program number 3" has PMT PID at hex address 0x0030 (video ES PID 0x0031, primary audio ES PID 0x0034 as you would expect), but it remaps via PSIP to 2.2, whearas their HD service is MPEG2 "program number 4" with PID at 0x0040, but it remaps via PSIP to 2.1 ... Both of these HD+SD services("subchannels") are "tunable" on the waiting room sets I "channel surfed through", but only the SD subchannel (what most of us get OTA via PSIP on 2.2) is present from this station on the sets in the patient rooms ... (of course that's no biggie since the Cincinnati NBC HD affilite's HD is on the patient sets) ....

The cablenets they have are currently all SD, from D*, they're present on UHF, using the analog tuners in the sets ... For some reason, when I've been visiting a family member over the past week, a "Directv" banner was present on the ESPN2 channel(ESPN + ESPNC were fine), which was a bummer last saturday as Family member I was visisting wanted to watch the NASCAR Nationwide series race ...

Note that these services/channels are "labeled" in a channel banner that shows up on the sets as follows "CBS" ,Discovery channel"/etc/etc .... Channel 2~13, where the broadcast digital signals are (on the waiting room sets with minor channel numbers present as well, such as "5.1, 5.2" ... ) are shown on the channel banner/OSD info as "digital", channels 14~45 are shown in the channel banners as "analog" .....

All the sets are LG or Zenith LCD HDTV's (16x9 displays), all are wall mounted that I saw. all the patient rooms have 26" models, there are mostly 42" models in waiting rooms(may have seen a 50" or two as well), a couple of the latter I looked at were hooked up to LST-4100 "control boxes", also wall mounted.

the displays were "set" for 16x9 display, which worked fine for the 720p or 1080i broadcast sources, but with no pillarbars "added" for 4x3 material from the SD services this resulted in "stretched" SD(i.e. short fat people/etc) ... While one can adjust the display mode via a "menu" option on the set for proper AR to result from 4x3 sources(i.e. add in pillar boxes on the sides, or even "crop/zoom" mode for 16x9 letterboxed stuff "inside" a 4x3 signal), I noticed the sets reset back to 'full' or "16x9 mode" if power is cycled and there seemed to be no control of this from the patients' remotes, which means you see a lot of "stretched" SD except on sets which are not tuned to the 720p/1080i broadcast sources ...

Also noticed that while various SD multicast subchannels are "present" on the waiting room sets(and the dayton NBC HD affiliate's HD service("subchannel) as noted earlier) such as weatherPlus from the Cincinnati NBC HD affiliate, but not present/tunable on the sets in the patient rooms, If I recall correctly, except for the Cincinnati "CW" affilate which is a SD multicast on Cincinnati CBS HD affiliate's digital station. But, I didn't try to see if a "channel scan"/etc would fix this or if I could even access such a "scan option" from the "buttons" on the sets ...

Other than the display/AR formatting "issues" resulting in a lot of "short fat people" seen on screen for the 4x3 SD sources, I thought it was pretty cool they way they're doing it, and of course, keeping in mind the place has only been open for a couple of months .....

While I did notice a lot of sets tuned to 4x3 SD sources w/o anyone reaching up to press a couple of buttons on the set to "fix it" (well except for me , I also noticed a lot of "HD watching" of the local broadcast affiliates, including The Cincinnati ABC affiliate which has HD local news, and the CBS Dayton affiliate which has Widescreen SD local news, which in this case turns out looking remarkably good(especially the studio shots) broadcast as upconverted to 1080i ....

More than anyone wanted to know probably, but again, except for the "stretched SD" all in all I thought it was pretty cool how they've made their "DTV transistion" ...

Does anyone have any info on the TV situation at the Hyatt Regency Chicago downtown by the river? I'll be staying there for a week in May. They say they have plasma TVs in the rooms, but, of course, they don't say anything about what you'll receive on them.

Larry
SF

They will probably have one of those commander boxes... If you want to watch HD you better hit the bars/restaurants in Downtown Chicago, I speak from recent experience (I saw some lobbies from other hotels with zoomed SD).