Communal TV screens in a binge-watching age won’t do
WHAT airline passenger hasn’t felt the letdown? You board a long-haul flight, ready to settle in for hours of binge-watching a popular television series, only to discover the plane’s onboard entertainment is stuck in a time warp, offering outdated content or – in a throwback to the 1990s – communal television screens for the whole cabin.
For a public increasingly accustomed to nearly ubiquitous internet access, with on-demand video and continuous social media feeds, the airline cabin too often feels like a final, frustrating frontier.
But David Dicko, a French entrepreneur, is among the many taking aim at in-flight entertainment ennui.
His startup, SkyLights, has built a virtual reality headset that allows travellers to watch the latest 3-D Hollywood releases at their seats. The device, with a six-hour battery life, is coupled with noise-cancelling headphones.
“People on planes are hungry for different entertainment options,” said Dicko, whose small team of developers has been testing the headsets on flights for nearly a year. Last week, XL Airways – a low-cost, long-haul French carrier – became the first airline to offer a commercial version of SkyLights service to passengers for $16 a flight.
“Putting virtual reality headsets inside an aircraft is an idea as old as virtual reality itself,” said Dicko, who previously worked as a pilot for Air France-KLM, referring to the decades-old hope of offering passengers 3D-style entertainment.
Dicko’s 3D headset is part of an industrywide push to bring carriers’ in-flight entertainment up to the standards many passengers expect when they travel by car or train. The onboard efforts include beaming internet directly to cabins, as well as new partnerships with Netflix and other content streaming services.
It is all in recognition of how mediadependent today’s travellers have become. Many, even most, are ac- customed to almost universal internet access through home broadband and mobile internet packages. They are also likely to have subscriptions to video services like Hulu or music services like Spotify.
Much of this momentum is because of multimillion-dollar investments from Gogo, currently the largest onboard WiFi provider, and its competitors, which aim to approach or even match internet speeds available on the ground.
About 2,600 commercial aircraft currently use Gogo services. And by the end of this month, about 75 of those planes will have been upgraded to give users internet speeds comparable to what their smartphones can provide on the ground.
The new high-speed services are available on aircraft from Delta and Virgin Atlantic, among others, and represent a significant upgrade to Gogo’s existing connectivity options, which have mainly been limited to sending emails or checking social media.
Anais Marzo, head of aircraft interiors marketing at Airbus, the European aircraft giant, said that passengers now wanted almost constant access to their social media feeds, email accounts and other digital services. But she said that would not detract from traditional onboard options and seat-back television screens, particularly in business or first class where large high-definition displays are now the norm.
“More and more people are relying on their own devices on board,” Marzo said, adding that about 60 percent of Airbus’ worldwide fleet, or 16,500 planes, will have some sort of internet connectivity by 2025. But having a smartphone, she said, “doesn’t exclude using a back-of-seat display”. Others are not so sure. Some airline executives say that travellers’ increasing reliance on their own devices is making carriers review their existing onboard entertainment options. Built-in screens and the miles of fiber-optic cable that serve them, they note, can add significant weight – and cost – to flights.
Vincent Tomasoni is head of product at XL Airways, the French carrier that, along with offering passengers SkyLights’ new 3D headsets, also rents tablets to its onboard customers. He says the ability to offer streaming content over in-flight WiFi represents a change for many airlines.
Passengers can continue using their own devices while accessing a larger pool of movies, television shows and radio programs, he said, enabling airlines to consider scrapping traditional in-flight entertainment hardware and reducing the cost and complexity of such services.
“The world of seat-backed entertainment is over,” Tomasoni said.