HD Sets in Hotels Finally Getting HD Sources

Marriott, InterContinental and Hilton Hotels are all adding HD services this year.

A few years back the Excalibur hotel in Las Vegas completely made-over their rooms. They got new paintjobs, new carpet, new beds, and nice new 40” LCD sets. I stayed in one such room during CES ’09 and I was disappointed to find out that those HD sets were still restrained to standard definition cable. Not only that, but the TVs were set to stretch the picture out, making it unbearable to watch anything.

Most hotels see these large televisions as “nice-looking pieces of furniture,” according to Marc Ginsberg of DirecTV. They purchase the TVs so they can say they have HDTVs and so that their rooms look up to date, but don’t understand a high def signal needs to accompany it.

Three of the world’s largest hotel chains - Marriott, InterContinental and Hilton – are finally fixing the problem by bringing HD service to hotels with HDTVs. In most cases, there will be fourteen HD channels available out of the forty to fifty channels at each hotel.

It’s a start. Maybe not an impressive start, but it’s a lot better than none.

Source: USA Today