KVH Intros Digital Crew Welfare Solution

KVH Industries, a provider of mobile connectivity and inertial navigation systems, has introduced a new digital content service called KVH Link to help shipowners, operators and managers provide rest-time entertainment for seafarers and increase onboard productivity.

KVH Link provides timely and popular news, sports, movies, TV, music, karaoke, podcasts, documentaries, trending social videos, in the most popular languages among seafarers.

Building on KVH’s past experience providing content for crew well-being and its patented IP-MobileCastTM technology for content delivery, KVH Link provides timely and popular news, sports, movies, TV, music, karaoke, podcasts, documentaries, trending social videos, and more in a sleek new user interface designed with digital natives in mind.

“There is an increasing focus on seafarer well-being as the foundation of safe, efficient operations,” said Mark Woodhead, KVH’s executive vice president for mobile connectivity.

“At the same time, crew welfare is going digital, with increased on-board demand for access to popular content. With our decades of experience in providing crew content—starting in the 1960s with reel-to-reel movie nights on the deck of a ship—to our history of mobile tech innovation, KVH is uniquely suited to deliver a digital content platform for today’s seafarer,” Mark added.

KVH Link crew wellbeing content includes: NEWSlinkTM hundreds of daily news stories, clips, and shows in the most popular languages among seafarers; SPORTSlinkTM news and video sports highlights from teams around the world, sports talk shows, and documentaries; MOVIElinkTM early release movies and classics from Hollywood to Bollywood and independent studios; TVlinkTM full seasons of popular hit television series; and MUSIClinkTM more than 15 genres of music radio, podcasts, karaoke, and more. KVH Link content is licensed from copyright holders for crew viewing.

Accessible for group viewing on a vessel TV screen or on seafarers’ personal devices, KVH Link features intuitive online navigation to enable users to quickly find the audio, text, and video content they want. The service is available as a monthly content subscription package incurring no data delivery charge.

In developing the KVH Link service, KVH built on its experience with the IP-MobileCast content delivery service it introduced in 2014, which features patented technology for delivering cybersecure, encrypted multimedia content to vessels with mini-VSAT BroadbandTM connectivity.

KVH also announced KVH linkHUB, a new service that provides entertainment content via secure, encrypted content drives to vessels that do not have KVH mini-VSAT Broadband connectivity, or to mixed fleets with a variety of satellite providers.

“Today, all vessels in a fleet need news and entertainment content even when several different satellite connectivity vendors are involved,” said Woodhead. “With KVH Link and linkHUB, we can deliver terrific content to every vessel in the fleet.”