FoCuS on inflight entertainment
Sally Gethin of Gethin’s Inflight News reports back from Aircraft Interiors in Hamburg on the next big step in IFE – wireless servers onboard
Cutting the cable
Aircraft Interiors Expo is now the launchpad for many of the industry's inflight entertainment innovations. This year IFE covered some 12 per cent of the show floor space with 120 exhibitors
THE buzz on the floor this year was wireless content distribution. What this means is that passengers can watch the airline’s inflight entertainment like audio and video programming on their own electronic devices. It can also mean that the inflight entertainment is shown on rental devices such as tablets or iPads that are loaned to passengers while they are onboard. Up until now inflight entertainment relied on
lots of wiring and cables running from a large server (called a headend) inside the galley out to individual seats. These lengthy wires and cables have to be fitted inside the cabin, and often rely on seat electronic boxes installed underneath a row of seats or every seat, which in turn power and deliver audio video
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www.onboardhospitality.com
“Lufthansa Systems created a stir by announcing it had approval from Hollywood to show EW movies via BoardConnect”
entertainment into the seatback screens or in-arm videos. But having a wireless server onboard enables content to be streamed without any cables or wires to any device. It does require some additional lightweight infrastructure such as wireless access points to be positioned strategically within the cabin. But there are hurdles to enabling IFE content
to be streamed direct to a passenger device, mainly due to the variety of handheld mobile devices, their software platforms and the level of technology built into each one. There is also
a wide concern among the film distributors in Hollywood that their movies could be pirated once they are streamed onto a passenger owned device. Most IFE companies at AIX announced plans
or ongoing projects to enable airlines to install this technology. Indeed one independent commentator, researcher Matthew Towers of IMS Research indicated that the majority of airlines want this technology within two to five years’ time. However he noted at the AIX cabin conference that Early Window content (new movies from Hollywood and leading
©Sally Gethin
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