Web TV in Madrid

As I mentioned in my previous post, this week I am at FICOD2008, an international forum on digital content taking place in Madrid, Spain. Dragos and I are stayting at Orense Hotel, part of the Rafaello Hotels Chain. Since we’re into the digital content business and since we’re at a digital content conference, we were pleased to see that we were actually living the digital experience all around us, starting with the very hotel room.

The TV set in the hotel room has moved beyond the basic TV that we’re used to handle everyday at home, at work or even in a hotel room, at least in Romania. The Madrid hotel TV is a truly interactive WebTV, controlled not only by a remote that acts as a mouse, but also by a keyboard that allows you to actually surf the web on your TV screen. In terms of digital content, the WebTV offers regular TV channels to watch (kind of a limited offer, just some Spanish, German channels and CNN), as well as pay per view TV channels (from business to sports and even adult channels) and special shows and channels that you can play, pause, rewind/fast-forward and even record.

While at FICOD2008 people are looking at the future of digital content, while also experiencing it in their everyday life, I believe that we should also move beyond just discussing future business opportunities in the digital media and start putting it to work because the technology is here already, we just need to educate the market to accept it, adopt it and pay for it.