A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Feb 6, 2017

Why Your In-Flight Movie Screen Is Going Blank

Bring your own device and the airline will provide the connection. It costs - and weighs - less for the airline and though sometimes now free, they will inevitably charge for the hook-up. JL

Justin Bachman reports in Bloomberg:

The determining factor is poundage. Planting a screen in each seat adds weight, which burns additional fuel, which costs more money. The screens have a tendency to break as people poke and punch them—often to the annoyance of the passenger in front of them. For in-flight entertainment, the new kid is personal-device entertainment—the ability to stream TV and movies to passenger gadgets from a server on the plane.
Book a domestic flight on any of the Big Three U.S. airlines, and you won’t be sure whether the seat in front of you has a screen. Some do, while most don’t. Eventually maybe none will.
The proliferation of iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, in tandem with increasingly reliable inflight Wi-Fi, has led to a profound shift by many airlines, which now view entertainment on shorter flights as best delivered wirelessly, without the expense or hassles posed by screens.
As with most things on an airplane, the determining factor is poundage. Planting a screen in each seat adds weight, which burns additional fuel, which costs more money. On top of that, the screens have a tendency to break as people poke and punch them—often to the annoyance of the passenger in front of them. Today, the new kid on the block for in-flight entertainment, or IFE, is personal-device entertainment—the ability to stream TV and movies to passenger gadgets from a server on the plane. This video is typically free, although United still charges as much as $7.99 to watch live television channels on planes equipped with DirecTV.
“For domestic flights, I really do see the industry trending toward streaming IFE,” said Jason Rabinowitz, director of airline research at Routehappy Inc., a New York company that tracks airline amenities. “It’s cheap for airlines to install, there’s no wiring, no weight penalty. These systems can be installed virtually overnight, and the costs to maintain these things are virtually nothing.”

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