GTMaritime is introducing a distribution service for vessel operators to deliver news from crew members’ home countries to vessels at sea.
Specifically designed for the marine environment, GTNews4Crew can be configured according to the nationalities and interests of those on board, with a choice of news channels from 20 language preferences, including Hindi, Filipino, and Russian.
News articles and clips can be accessed by seafarers on their own devices once they have been downloaded to the onboard GTNews4Crew server. As the content is downloaded once and stored locally on the ship’s internal network there will be no crew charges for internet access.
“A multilingual, locally-sourced solution was essential to avoid ‘foreign hotel TV’ syndrome, where you end up watching domestic broadcasts in the typically futile hope something from home will crop up and, if it does, then trying to piece the story together from any captions, footage, or listening beneath over-dubs. It invariably leaves you none the wiser,” said Mike McNally, Global Commercial Director at GTMaritime.
Content options can be managed on a vessel-by-vessel or fleetwide basis via a dashboard, with control over how much and how often fresh news content is distributed to allow the operator to match download sizes to the company’s satcom set-up. In the case of severe bandwidth constraints, the delivery of any images accompanying articles can be switched off, GTMaritime says.
