For our first project, we have a big one. It was inspired by a friend who works at a hotel. The hotel is looking into new systems that offer in-room movies. One proposal included a system that allows guests to select a movie for viewing and then gives them local control to view the movie over a six-hour period. In other words, much like a Tivo set-top box, they can pause, rewind and replay.

This differs from other systems that just allow them to queue up and watch one of the available copies of the movie from a central system. In addition to these movies, the system would provide typical in-hotel offerings including guest services, shopping, Internet access and TV. Typical second-tier menus would include billing, hotel facilities, phone numbers, TV channel listings, city guide and shopping.

Additional services could include music-on-demand, airline schedules, video conferencing, distance learning, message service, wake-up services and pay-per-view events. The design would need to be such that adding new services would be simple.

To get you started, the design needs to include:

Questions that need to be addressed include:

Submit proposals by January 10, 2000. The best way to do this is send ASCII text to embedded@ssc.com. Our team will evaluate proposals as we receive them and display proposal status on our web site. The winning proposal will be announced in the April 2001 issue of Embedded Linux Journal.