Rescan your regional hotel room TV for new Digital Channels.

[samas]

With looming Analogue Switch Off around Australia there is an aggressive roll-out of terrestrial Digital TV to regional towns currently in full swing. Most of my business travel is regional Western Australia. I have found that if I go into the setup of the hotel room TV and do a rescan of the available TV channels most of the time I will get additional DTV channels that weren't there when I first turn the TV on. This is because these digital services would have gone live after the hotel installed their LCD TVs. Some TVs do pop up a message when it detects a new service automatically but from my experience many regional WA hotel TVs don't do this.

For example last week I stayed at the Best Western Geraldton and by rescanning the LCD I added GWN, WIN and TEN to my available DTV channels! (ABC and SBS DTV were already there).

You would think that hotels would rescan the TV when new services go live in their town for the benefit of their guests but this is rarely the case!


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[chrisb]

The provision of TV services has always been something that has annoyed me in hotels.

Missing channels, screwed up aspect ratios, bad picture, still using CRTs etc.

Even in 5 star hotels it seems to be something they have to provide but they have no respect for.

 

[moa999]

or the number of 5* hotels that clearly have a Foxtel and digital feed, but then use an analogue distribution system....

and don't get me started on those who stretch 4:3 pictures into 16:9.

 

[chrisb]

and don't get me started on those who stretch 4:3 pictures into 16:9.

Don't get me started on those who take a 16:9 feed, chop the sides off to 4:3 and then stretch it back to 16:9 on an LCD!

I assume this is a limitation of whatever old internal reboardcast system they use but it just goes to show it's something they're not willing to spend money on to do properly.

 

[medhead]

My Sydney hotel has a weird tv problem. ABC1 goes in an out of tune around about the time that ABC for kids closes. ABC2 then comes onto the channel 9 that previously had ABC 4 kids. It seems to me that they must be switching something around on their in house distribution system, as the timing was pretty much the same over multiple nights. Anyway, I told them something weird was going on, tried to describe the timings and how each channel was changing. Answer: new TV in the room and the problem still happens.


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[dk4]

Some TVs do pop up a message when it detects a new service automatically..

My TVs at home seem to just add new channels as they start to transmit: over the last few months I have been kept busy manually deleting all the new "shopping channels" that keep popping up, damn annoying. (Wouldn't mind so much if they were channels with actual programming, look I even keep the ones that screen stale 80's British dramas tuned in, but the channels that are simply one long advert, well IMO they need auto-deleting.)

 

[markis10]

Not much point rescanning your TV if its not connected directly to an antenna.

 

[samas]

Not much point rescanning your TV if its not connected directly to an antenna.

I'm not sure what sort of system the hotel had I stayed at last week but they had re-modulated analogue channels, including two movie channels, Sky News, Fox Sports but all local DTV channels were picked up during the rescan so there is an antenna connected into the system somehow to allow direct reception.

 

[RWJ777]

If I could manage to turn on the TV and navigate past the front menu, which seemingly takes a computing engineering degree to do so, I suspect I'd be very happy with the in-house broadcasting system. Whatever happened to just turning on the TV and changing channels?

Oh, and my other source of annoyance, no AM radio reception in hotels. Not sure if DAB will fix that but the number of times I've had to console myself with Classic 80s hits FM rather than NewsRadio or Radio National is too many.

 

[risky]

I haven't turned on a TV in a hotel room for many years!