The Trend Toward Streaming

“A customer often doesn’t know what they want until they’re out on the water,” says Dimitrios Kouskoulis, CEO of the marine integrator SSP, a firm based in Greece. Kouskoulis undertook an experiment a short time ago. “I took my daughter and my wife and chartered a yacht for a three-day tour of the Greek islands,” he says. “When we started the journey, my daughter said, ‘Daddy, I want to see Netflix and Disney.’ I wanted to see the news. And when we had dinner or lunch, we wanted to play some music.

“None of those options were available on that vessel.”

Kouskoulis has created a repeatable template that starts with those media basics. It’s a package that provides a baseline for providing those AV services, and it’s something that’s entirely in line with what the team at VBH has noticed. “We are moving away from sources like live TV, and literally every refit lately has been focused on streaming,” says Rutger Bleijenberg, lead sales engineer for service and refits for VBH. Starlink has made that possibility much less expensive, and AV-over-IP solutions have made installation easier, faster, and much more scalable.

There’s also a generational shift, according to Juliette Warter, who handles marketing and communications for VBH France. “There is a significant difference between older owners and tech-savvy younger owners,” she says. “Older customers just want to have it plain and simple — just a remote control, no touch screens. Even if they have a really cool system on board, they’ll just want to downsize it and simplify it. Younger customers want every feature we can give them — and those digital natives have no problem controlling everything from their phones.”

“As far as ‘wants’ — we don’t see wish lists as much as we see a list of things clients don’t want,” she adds. (Internally, the VBH team uses a very colorful term for that other “list” — you get the picture.) “They’ll tell us they don’t want five remotes, they don’t want to have to check to see if their phones connected every time they step on board — and we can build products and experiences that eliminate those things they dislike.”

Hardware and Software, Lighting and Security

As Kerkhof notes, that means that DM NVX® AV-over-IP technology and DM NAX® Audio-over-IP solutions are moving all those AV signals through the vessel. “As we’ve mentioned before, DM NAX technology was designed specifically to handle marine environments,” says Kerkhof. And the technology is evolving to meet the very specific demands of the superyacht owner: “We see growing demand for video walls with multiple sources, and Multiview functionality is now a key feature of our DM NVX 384 encoder/decoder — problem solved,” says Kerkhof.

Another trend in the shipyards: new, advanced lighting solutions are being installed in superyachts. “Lighting used to be very simple — it was ‘old school’ technology: just a light source and a dimmer,” says Bleijenberg. “Now we have tunable lights, and for that we need control, we need automation, and we need to understand how that all works with shading and natural light.”

“There’s a growing demand for circadian lighting,” adds Warter. “People want that cyclical pattern when they’re relaxing on board.” (This is a trend we’ve spoken about on the Crestron blog very recently — and circadian lighting may be just as beneficial for the crew as the owners and guests aboard a yacht.)

“Another thing that’s come up is cybersecurity,” says Warter. “As systems become more complex and connected, we need to ensure we’re protecting not only the owners and crew, but we need to address potential threats from charters,” she explains, noting that the vast majority of guests wouldn’t begin to suspect that they were compromising a system. “We need to understand who may be on board, how they use social media, if they intend to work remotely, and so on,” she adds. “That’s especially true with the current prevalence of BYOD situations.” Laptops and smartphones may be “dirty,” even if their owners don’t know it.