Dish Network Corporation has introduced a flexible new satellite television platform aimed specifically at hotels and other hospitality operations. This solution, dubbed SMARTbox, is capable of improving the in-room entertainment experience of hotel guests, while reducing total cost of ownership for owners.

Typically, hotel satellite solutions will just use a modified residential receiver. This often leads to issues because hotels face different challenges and usage scenarios than residential users. SMARTbox was designed in response to this.

“SMARTbox delivers a better overall free-to-guest operating experience for managers and a vastly improved end-user experience for guests,” said Robert Grosz, vice president of Commercial Sales at Dish. “Reducing installation, power consumption and management overhead are big wins in free-to-guest; having happier guests is even better.”

Back in May, Dish offered to buy spectrum from LightSquared — specifically its 60MHz spectrum, for which Dish was willing to pay $2 billion.

SMARTbox is an enterprise-grade solution that boasts a number of features designed to support hotel use. For example, the solution scales to provide a 36-96 channel lineup in HD and SD, compared to the industry standard of 12-24 channels. Meanwhile, a single SMARTbox unit can provide HD and SD channels concurrently, making it more efficient and cost effective for serving varying TV models in any size of hotel.

“As hotels face increasing costs to transition to HD, SMARTbox will deliver digital HD capabilities and analog SD from a single unit, making it ideal for hotels transitioning to new TVs,” said Alistair Chatwin, director of Product Management at Dish. “This enterprise-grade solution also benefits management by providing greater reliability, configurability and increased uptime while reducing the total cost of ownership.”

Other benefits offered by SMARTbox include: remote monitoring and management capabilities; up to 90 percent reduction in power consumption; and reduced space requirements compared to traditional solutions, as the SMARTbox was built according to standard rack-width spacing and is only nine inches high.