Lumio, the newest brand in home entertainment with Indian genes, has got a lot of well-deserved applause from all the tech critics as well as customers. When, in April 2025, we benchmarked its smart TVs before launch to validate their claim of being the fastest smart TVs, we were surprised to see the results where its smart TVs were performing 2-4x better than the competition’s smart TVs, including the pioneer brands of television!
Then, in some months, we also got to experience its ARC range of home smart projectors. Again, they were showing remarkable improvement in experience, though we did not perform any benchmarking as in smart TVs. Recently, I visited Circuit House in Bangalore and had a detailed interaction with the Lumio founding team. The vision, backed by strong R&D, product focus, and service excellence, only reinforces the belief in this brand. I also got the experience of its ARC smart home projectors in their R&D lab and dark room, where I was demonstrated the in and out of these portable, smart, yet powerful projectors.
Both the models ARC5 and ARC7 are primarily positioned as smart home projectors, and rightly so. But while going through the detailed demo, I felt it has an equally relevant use case in homestays and small hotels.
Here are my five big reasons why I believe so.
- Bigger screen aligned with customer expectations – The smart TV industry has seen phenomenal change in the last decade. As a result, the benchmarks have also changed. 15 years back, a 24-inch TV was considered ideal for family viewing, then came the era of 32-inch panels, and in the past 5 years, 44-45 inches has become the new ideal size. Across any display-enabled smart device, the trend of adopting bigger sizes has been fastest in smart TVs in the last 5 years. No other display-enabled gadget or device, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, or wearables, has seen such a fast pace of adopting bigger screen sizes and replacing industry standards. Hotels or homestays, the expectation of customers is always to get better experiences and services – something they are already used to in their daily lifestyle or better than that. Because of budgetary constraints, most of these homestays and small hotels still go for 32-inch smart TV which impacts the user experience. The immersive TV experience, where both screen and audio play a critical role, goes for a toss. Contrary to this, if we have an ARC5 or ARC7 smart projector in the hotel room, it gives up to 100-inch viewing, making it super immersive! Of course, one can even settle for 40 inches if they want to replicate closer to what they are used to at home.
- Superior technology for delightful experiences – The hospitality industry has one single goal – creating delightful experiences for its customers! The ARC range of smart home projectors from Lumio have several top-notch features and technologies which are part of premium and superlative entertainment experiences. For instance, both are powered by Dolby Audio. Similarly, Lumio has introduced TLDR layer over the Google OS which makes it effortless to catch up relevant content, stream music of interest and follow live updates of sporting events. This becomes even more relevant in a scenario like when someone is viewing it while on travel, as it saves a lot of time and one does not end up wasting time finding what to watch.
- Operationally wise, economically prudent – Every organisation, big or small, is always resource-constrained. So are the homestays and small hotels. There is prudence in saving every penny. Using Lumio smart projectors as an alternative to smart TVs is not only at times upfront cost-effective but can also be aligned with operational utilisation. For instance, there is no need to block capital in buying a smart TV for each room. Instead, every hotel or homestay is aware of the peak occupancy, which could be anywhere between 70-80% of the available capacity. The Lumio ARC projects are super portable, just 1.33 Kg (ARC5) and 2.36 Kg (ARC7) in weight. At the same time, it’s truly plug-and-play. Instead of having a smart TV for every room, one can plan ARC purchases only to meet the peak occupancy, making substantial savings on capital investment. Further, being smart, one simply needs to connect them over Wi-Fi. There is no need to lay cables for every room and have set-top boxes and buy CAS for each set-top box. In many small hotels, the set-top boxes are recharged every time a customer books a room, which is a big hassle, and in practice, several small hotels do not recharge for short stays or have very minimal FTA channels available, which may not necessarily align with the preferences of the customer.
- Additional monetisation opportunities – The entire hospitality industry is regularly challenged with seasonality and witnesses frequent peaks and troughs resulting in idle resources in off-seasons. With portable Lumio ARC projectors, the property owners can organise events like streaming live sports events, small gatherings on important days like Independence and Republic Day celebrations, or throw up entertainment-powered parties on New Year celebrations, etc. Though around New Year, these hotels and homestays are mostly adequately busy. The point is there can be additional monetisation opportunities where they can double up their infrastructure as mini theatres for small gatherings and celebrations. Even hosting corporate events can become easy where presentations are an essential part of offsites, annual planning meets, anniversary celebrations, etc.
- Watch your own content – Content comes at a cost. It’s not financially viable for small hotels and homestays to have subscriptions of Netflix, Amazon Prime, JioHotstar, YouTube Premium, Spotify, and several such apps that power modern-day entertainment. With Lumio ARC smart projectors, the hotels and homestays can allow customers to use their already subscribed accounts, log into the apps on the projector, and watch/resume watching their favourite content. The customers can always remove the login credentials before checking out.
These reasons strongly make Lumio ARC smart projectors an ideal entertainment device in homestays and small hotels. This becomes more important in places like Kashmir, where the hospitality sector faces uncertainty resulting in extreme situations when the occupancy dips down to even 5-10% of the capacity. This might be a small saving, but every penny counts!
