Is it possible for a hotel to use Apple TVs to distribute movies throughout the hotel as a 'hotel movie system'?

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Is it possible for a hotel to use Apple TVs to distribute movies throughout the hotel as a 'hotel movie system'?

Hi,

We are a very small resort business that is located inside the World Heritage Area. Due to this, we can't get broadband or even good mobile phone reception. Needless to say, the only way we get internet is via wireless internet providers and that can be quite flaky.

We need to establish a hotel entertainment system that can allow us to distribute movies that we've purchased across our internal wi-fi network (to avoid the need to do loads of trenching / cabling etc).

We are thinking about whether Apple TVs can help us do this? i.e.can we prepurchase and download a stack of movies and then make them available across our wifi network via the Apple TVs? We don't need to charge guests for access, it will be a value-add part of our service.

If this is possible is there also a way we can prevent people from access their personal iTunes accounts via the wireless internet? At the moment with the limited wireless ability, we couldn't afford to have this brought to a halt due to downloads etc?

Cheers

Helen

Posted on Sep 16, 2013 6:02 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 16, 2013 6:11 AM in response to Helbabe

If you were in your home, you could keep pre-purchased content in iTunes on a computer and then multiple Apple TV's could access that content over a local network. No problem, it works well.

However, the license you have agreed to when purchasing this content does not allow public broadcast, whether or not you are charging for this content or not.

I am not at all sure whether additional entertainment licenses that might be available in your location might provide a solution, you would have to look into this yourself.

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Answer 2

Sep 16, 2013 6:21 AM in response to Helbabe

As Winston mentions, talk to your lawyer as you may be in violation of the terms of use of Apple TV content if you rebroadcast it like that. There may well be legal ways to do it in your type of situation, but you'd want to be sure.

If you want to block others from using their own Apple TV's, you should be able to set up a firewall rule to block access at your wifi router. The ports used are listed in the following Apple KB article. Depending on your hardware, you could either just block ports, or if you have a firewall of your own inbetween the router and your clients, you could right rules based blocking. Simplest thing is just disable port 5353in your wifi router(s)), but you could also use a rule based firewall entry to block the application, regardless of port.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2463

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