SMART TALK ADAM WILLIAMS
Adam Williams, brand marketer and journalist, starts a series of highly topical articles for OnBoard Entertainment. He has worked in the IFE industry for nearly six years
RAVE takes centre stage
Awarded the coveted Crystal Cabin award last year in the 'Entertainment and Communication' category, the RAVE by The IMS Company has seemingly taken the industry by storm
INNOVATIVE IFE providers have introduced new technologies, such as Lumexis with fibre optics, but have yet to experience the same rapid adoption. Naturally, this anomaly begs the question: “What propelled the once handheld IFE provider to arguably third place in the seat back market?”
Over the last few years, several market factors have combined to create an environment wherein change is in the wind.
The need for lower cost systems The global economic tornado of the last few years not only blew against airlines but pushed many suppliers back to the drawing board to develop lower-cost solutions in order to procure new orders from cash- strapped airlines. Traditional seat back systems, despite some price reductions, still boast a price tag that does not reasonably align with many carriers’ budget goals. In its Inflight Technologies Market Outlook Report 2012, research firm IMDC wrote: “Seat-centric architecture can bring cost advantages to an airline, and deliver impressive reliability with a simple design.”
Consumer technology
The proliferation of smart devices with advanced technology is putting pressure on airlines to update systems with competitive features and functionality. Passengers expect an experience comparable to what they enjoy with smartphones and tablets. As IFE providers seek to re-imagine what an entertainment system should offer, they recognise the opportunity to integrate consumer technology into the system and gain greater efficiencies in system architecture, reliability and ease of maintenance. With seat centric systems, failure points are reduced to the seat level.
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Gogo puts the burden on providing inflight hardware on passengers
Taking it one step further, the RAVE exclusively allows 'hot swapping' or changing out the screens in-flight giving the flight attendants an immediate solution to a failure.
Capitalising on the opportunity The factors described above set the stage for change and at least ten airlines believe that the RAVE embodies that change. Joe Renton, ceo of IMS, commented, “The fact that ten airlines, including Lufthansa, chose RAVE before it ever flew is a testimony to the strength of the RAVE vision and the trust that airlines have been willing to invest in IMS.” While selecting a new IFE provider Lufthansa issued a formal RFQ to the usual suspects but selected IMS.
Michael Lamberty, from Lufthansa’s press
“IFE providers recognise the opportunity to integrate consumer technology into the system and gain greater efficiencies"
office, stated that the decision was the result of the RAVE’s,“functionality, which is in our opinion similar to the Panasonic eX2 (but without the possibility of having a dark flight due to the seat centric architecture) and has significantly less total ownership cost due to the lower cost in purchase price, weight and maintainability.”
Harry Gray, IMS’ vice president of sales and marketing, added, “As we have no legacy systems architecture to support, we started
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