One brand on every screen, in every room.

Chapter 01

Every property a different interface, remote and contract. Guests notice. So does your content team.

In most hotel groups, in room entertainment grew historically: one property on a legacy platform, another on a newer system, a third somewhere in between. Each works, more or less. But guests who stay across your properties get a different experience every time, content is updated hotel by hotel, and every platform carries its own contract, support route and failure modes. Consolidating to one standard turns all of that into a single, manageable service.

Walk your own properties and count. A guest checks into your flagship and finds a modern interface with casting from their own phone. Two weeks later the same guest, in the same loyalty programme, checks into your property two cities over and meets an old channel list and a remote with the buttons worn smooth. The brand promised consistency at booking. The room contradicts it by evening.

The cost is not only guest facing. Ask whoever manages content how long a group wide promotion takes: a restaurant campaign that should appear on every screen becomes four logins, three support tickets and one property that never quite gets updated. Meanwhile finance carries a stack of contracts with different terms, different renewal dates and price rises nobody benchmarks. Multiply that by every channel change, every screen fault and every firmware cycle, and the patchwork quietly taxes the whole operation. None of it shows up as a single line in the budget.

The move from the first column to the second is not a TV project. It is a standardisation project that happens to start with the largest screen in the room. Treat it that way from the first meeting. Give it one owner, one target standard and one migration calendar.

Chapter 02

For the guest, the brand, the operation and the migration itself.

Familiarity across every stay: the same welcome screen, the same casting flow from their own device, the same quality. Guests stop fighting the TV and start using it. For returning guests that familiarity is the point: the room behaves the way it did last time, in every city. That matters most when guests actually reach for the screen: a late arrival, a rainy evening, a child who needs a film now. A TV that behaves predictably is a small promise kept.

Every screen opens in your house style, in every room of every property. In room entertainment becomes a brand touchpoint instead of a leftover from the previous operator. Promotions, restaurant menus and event schedules appear group wide on the day they launch, not whenever each property gets around to it. That is hotel in room entertainment treated as part of the brand, not part of the furniture. For a group building one identity across cities, that consistency is hard to buy any other way.

One central portal for content, promotions and channels across the whole group. One contract, one support route, one team that knows the platform end to end. When a screen misbehaves, the conversation is short: one supplier, one platform, one known fix, instead of a diagnosis across four systems with four support desks. Spare hardware, monitoring and updates follow the same single standard. Night staff call one number and describe one system, which shortens every incident at the hour when help is thinnest.

Cutovers happen per property, pre staged and planned outside peak occupancy. Guests notice exactly one thing: a new welcome screen the next morning. Rollback stays ready during every cutover, so a problem room goes back to the old system in minutes instead of standing out of order overnight. Migrations fail in public, in occupied rooms, on event days. The pre staging and the rollback exist so a bad hour stays a technical note instead of a guest complaint.

This is the same consolidation logic we apply across IT: one standard, one owner, applied domain by domain. Guest WiFi, telephony, workplace, entertainment: each consolidated once, then run centrally. The TV estate is often the most visible place to start, because every guest sees the result on day one. The discipline it builds, the inventory, the supplier model and the cutover routine, carries over to the next domain almost for free.

Chapter 03

What the programme commits to.

A consolidation programme is easy to promise and easy to let drift. Properties postpone, contracts overlap, and two years later half the group runs the new standard while the other half waits. We keep the programme honest with three commitments, agreed with the group before the first screen is touched. They are not targets to aim for. They are promises the programme makes to the board, and the board can hold.

Every property migrates to the same standard, including the small ones and the awkward ones. The moment one hotel is allowed to stay behind, you are running two estates again and the business case quietly halves. Exceptions are the patchwork starting over, one polite postponement at a time. The standard itself is chosen once, with brand and operations at the table, so no property has grounds to relitigate it later.

Guests never see the migration. Hardware is configured off site, rooms are cut over outside peak occupancy and the guest facing change is a new welcome screen the next morning. If a cutover cannot meet that bar in a given week, it moves to a quieter one. The calendar bends. The commitment does not.

From the first migrated property onward, content is managed centrally. The portal simply grows as properties join, so the content team learns one workflow once and each following migration adds rooms, not complexity. By the final cutover, central management is already routine. Reporting follows the same line: one view of what is live on every screen in the group. When a promotion ends, it ends everywhere on the same day.

Three commitments fit on the first page of the programme plan. Review them at every steering meeting. If all three still hold, the programme is on track, whatever else the week brought. If one slips, name it and repair it before the next cutover. A commitment quietly waived is the patchwork returning under a new name.

Chapter 04

A rhythm that respects occupancy.

A group wide migration is a series of small, well rehearsed cutovers, not one big bang. We inventory every property, pre stage hardware off site and migrate hotel by hotel, coordinated with your operation as part of our IT Strategy & Project Services.

Map platforms, screens, contracts and room counts per property. This is where the surprises surface: rooms missing from counts, contracts that auto renewed last month, screens too old to reuse. Better to find them on paper than mid migration. It also sets the migration order: contract end dates, refurbishment plans and occupancy patterns decide which property goes first. A programme built on a verified inventory rarely argues with reality later.

Configure and test all hardware before it ever enters a room. Every screen arrives at the property already set up for its exact room, so the on site work is mounting and checking, not troubleshooting. Faults surface in the staging room, on our time, not in a guest room on yours. That is what makes the one night commitment realistic.

Migrate per property, outside peak occupancy, with rollback ready. Housekeeping and front office know the schedule, so a room in migration is never sold as ready and a fault never meets a guest. The rollback path is rehearsed before it is needed. A room that misbehaves returns to the old platform the same night and rejoins the queue in the next window.

Run content, updates and support from one portal for the whole group. The first migrated property already benefits, so the group sees value long before the programme ends. Support follows the same route: one number for every property, one team that has seen the fault before. Updates and security patches roll out group wide on a schedule, not whenever a property remembers. The estate stays current as one fleet.

Typical rhythm: one property every few weeks, with lessons from each cutover applied to the next. The first cutover is the slowest. The fifth runs on rails, and contract end dates on the old platforms set the natural order of the queue. Pauses are planned around what matters to the hotel: high season, conference weeks, renovation phases. The rhythm serves the occupancy calendar, not the other way around.

Chapter 05

A guest never compliments a TV platform. They compliment a stay that simply worked.

Consolidating in room entertainment is one of the most visible IT improvements a group can make: every guest sees it, every property benefits and the operation gets simpler. It works best on a network designed for it. Read guest WiFi is a promise, not a utility, or how openings force the standard question in the hotel opening playbook.

There is a sequencing lesson in that. Groups often plan entertainment consolidation as a cosmetic project and network investment as an infrastructure project, budgeted years apart. In practice they are the same guest promise: the screen is only as good as the bandwidth and the WiFi behind it. Plan them together and both budgets work harder. The same goes for refurbishments: if rooms are out of order anyway, that is the cheapest cutover window the programme will ever get.

And once the group runs one platform, the next decisions get easier. New properties inherit the standard on opening day, acquisitions have a clear target to migrate to, and every future feature, from casting upgrades to guest messaging on screen, becomes a rollout instead of a project. That is what consolidation buys: not just a better TV, but a group that can move as one.