The Future of Personal Wireless IFE – in the age of the iPad

Yesterday, Mary Kirby of the RunwayGirl fame told me on Twitter that our previous discussions on iPad being used as an in-flight entertainment system are being realized rather soon. Around the same time, I received a guest post about the future of personal wireless IFEs in airplanes. And couldn’t help post it here immediately.

This guest post is written by Toms Purgailis, who is a student from Riga, Latvia interested in all modes of transport and synergies between transport and land use. He runs blog www.rigmobility.blogspot.com about transport and planning issues in the Baltic states.
———————

This post is inspired by Shashank’s Can the Apple iPad revolutionize the way airlines do business? and aims to take a step further. I want to share my ideas how to benefit from passenger’s devices and their content, save weight and cash.

A big part of travelers bring their laptops and smart-phones with them on-board for ground activities but use airline’s provided in-flight entertainment system (IFE) to kill the time during flight. No-brainer that such a system is not the most effective as hundreds of gadgets just lay somewhere in bags during the flight.

A simple (and very effective) solution would be to provide absolutely none entertainment system and push the costumers to use their own pre-loaded media. This makes no headache for airline and involves absolutely all media players onboard – from mp3 players to high-power laptops. But let’s see how efficient IFE system we can build by connecting the gadgets.

IFE Display – Bring Your Own

Looking from hardware’s perspective – the doubling of devices (private and airline’s offered) must be eliminated. Installing wireless intranet can give an easy access to onboard server for part of the passengers’ devices. The array of personal screens and kilometers of wiring than could be dropped and the precious kilograms – saved. Airlines then could rent appropriate portable devices to those who don’t have any and get some additional revenue. Connection to the Internet is optional but – once installed – can actually substitute the onboard media server if provided speed is high enough to watch movies online. A problem for laptop use is low batteries that can cut the movie in the most exciting moment but – if the airline is willing to invest in the aircrafts – power sockets would fix the problem.

Sharing the Multimedia

Passengers’ devices most probably contain gigabytes of legally and illegally obtained media, but how to make it accessible to everyone onboard? Copying using flash drives is one solution – slow and limited but makes people socializing and more important – is absolutely untraceable and usually considered as legal. More advanced and convenient system can be built sending the data trough the wireless connection but right now it is tricky to bring it within legal frames. I see that direct sending of files to specific users (like an e-mail) can replace copying from flash drives and could be considered more or less legal. If the concept of passenger-provided content works, two goals will be reached – the media costs will be cut and content will be more current. Airline can make the system more stable and predictable by uploading some less dynamic media which is accessible for everyone onboard regardless of the offers from other travelers.

IFE systems – especially the personal seatback ones – so far have been considered as a matter of prestige for some airlines and most likely won’t be dumped. This make the concept of wireless based and costumer powered IFE more suitable to LCC, particularly the long-haul ones.