IPTV scenario description (PD)

Planet Digital is a hospitality-IPTV System Integrator delivering one of the most innovative hospitality-IPTV systems available today. Beside the stand alone solution, Planet Digital owns and operates a fiberglass cable network in the Ötztal and delivers its technology and services to other cable operators in Austria.

With the acquired knowledge since the establishment of the company in 2004 and thanks to tight cooperations with renowned research institutes, Planet Digital is able to deliver, beside of the classical triple play of IPTV operators (Internet, television and telephone), very innovative services such as video functions, virtual maps, shop functions, booking and reservation func-tions, interactive advertising spaces, credit card services, time shift, video on demand, audio on demand, voice over IP, and many more. Planet Digital wants to be a first mover in main upcoming trends and technologies and is therefore setting the first steps for a “learning sys-tem” – a system that improves constantly and adapts its offer to individual customer needs. The combination of semantic technology with the streaming data will be a major step for this endeavor. The aim of Planet Digital is to strongly support the development of semantic applications and to implement them in the IPTV system.

Hotels are interested in presenting tourism possibilities in their proximity on their websites both as a means to inform guests and also to win new guests who are interested in participating in local activities and events. Of course, when a guest is staying in the hotel they are also able to use their in-room TV, and many hotels already offer dedicated channels which present their own services and facilities. Using the ConnectME platform, Planet Digital can offer hotels the means to construct a Web-based TV channel of local interest, which can be delivered in-hotel via their IPTV platform and incorporate remote control-based interactivity so that guests can immediately request additional information (on their TV!) and indicate their interest in participation in or purchase of a presented activity. A ConnectME module integrated into the Planet Digital IPTV platform will give hotels the means to dynamically find relevant media to enrich their channel, based on the video metadata (e.g. geolocation, activity or event type) and also define how their channel may be dynamically generated for each guest (e.g. personalisation due to expressed interests of the guest leading to a different ranking of played-back videos). From the video metadata, additional Web content will also be associated with the hotel channel (as in (1) above) and made available by button-press on the remote control to the TV viewer. This content can also again include (paid for) advertising content and links for e-marketing (such as services to book a table at the restaurant, or get a discount on the first cocktail at the bar).