TCD graduate linked to system set to serve up multimedia to hotel guests

What do you usually do in your hotel room? The Interactive Media Company, a London-based firm with roots in Trinity College Dublin, believes it has a better suggestion.

IMC intends to pump digitally-delivered television, films, music, games, Internet and e-mail, and applications like computer word processing programmes, straight into hotel rooms via a computer monitor disguised as a television set. Hoteliers will also be able to offer information and services such as teleconferencing over the same box - even digital room service.

Although existing system prototypes use high-end computer monitors - including wall-mounted flat plasma screens - using the system is not much different from pointing at your home telly with the remote. Indeed, it's probably easier, since the special remotes, complete with inset mouse, have considerably fewer buttons than most home-system remotes. The system runs off IMC's home-built NEOS software.

"Our philosophy is, if you can operate a TV, you can operate this," says TCD engineering graduate John Cunningham, the company's technology manager. What the user sees is a TV screen with numerous menu choices. Choose music, and you're offered a range of songs. The Internet button takes you quickly online, from where you can send and receive e-mail, perhaps through a hotel "loyalty" account, if you're a repeat customer. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are also available, and users can store documents temporarily online (as a security measure, the system automatically deletes documents and e-mail on check-out).

Films are also available, although IMC's chief executive, Englishman Mr Nigel Taylor says that very few hotel guests in top hotels ever watch movies. Televisions are placed in hotels for free by the pay-TV industry which then provides TV-based films and shares revenue with the hotelier. But in the US, the average hotel room only generates $22 (€23) per room per month for the hotelier, says Mr Taylor. And most films are already on second or third release. Films go to airlines before making it to hotel rooms - and as Mr Taylor notes, most guests have just arrived off a plane. Thus, he says, hotels should be interested in a system that can offer a range of entertainment and services, as well as an Internet connection. So far, the industry seems to agree - the system was named most innovative product of 1999 at the Eurhotec trade fair in Vienna.

The company began as a European Union-funded ESPRIT project on the convergence of digital media, a collaborative initiative between Trinity (under Prof Jeremy Jones) and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxford.

Initial efforts produced interactive kiosks. Mr Taylor, saw the system demonstrated in 1997 and believed it had great potential in the hospitality industry. So he bought the company, in which TCD and the Oxford lab retain a joint 10 per cent stake.

"If this business goes where we think it will go, it will be the biggest return they've ever had," he says cheerfully. So far the company has been backed entirely through private funds but he's currently talking to venture capitalists, and says he plans to take the company public within two years.

Mr Taylor is targeting the very high end of the hotel market - four and five-star establishments used by executives on business trips - which includes nearly two million rooms in 9,000 hotels.

At the moment, it's a jittery market - hoteliers are afraid customers are going to treat them as commodities and shop around for the cheapest possible rates, a likelihood spurred by the Internet.

He believes hotels will welcome the chance to differentiate by offering the NEOS service and to advertise their own extra services through a more sophisticated medium than teletext or a brochure.

Mr Taylor says IMC wants a third party to finance placing the equipment in hotel rooms, which could be funded through a revenue-share agreement with the hotel. IMC would supply the NEOS system and potentially would also take a slice of advertising or e-commerce revenue.

Although IMC is initially handling the delivery of content as well, Mr Taylor expects media management companies will spring up to deliver that service.

IMC has already placed systems in a private Harley Street clinic in London and the system is under consideration in several large British hotel chains (IMC's chairman is also the chairman of Hilton International). It still must overcome hotelier's basic fears of computers and their costs. However, it has an innovative solution. It took a monitor and its accompanying Compaq box to a local car repair shop and had them spray-paint them black. Now they look like a harmless TV and set-top box. "The black-box solution makes it much easier to create interest in the market," grins Mr Taylor.