Why iPads Are the Future of In-Flight Entertainment

Not so long ago, those expensive, proprietary seat-back entertainment systems were the coolest way to entertain yourself in the sky - and a key point of airline differentiation. But the rising popularity of iPads threatens to make even the slickest built-in entertainment systems obsolete. Forward-thinking airlines are scrambling to get ahead of the trend.

Until quite recently, the prevailing school of thought was to make traditional in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems bigger and better. That's certainly the idea behind IFE systems on new Boeing 'Dreamliner' 787s.

But as more and more passengers tote their own tablets (not to mention laptops, ultrabooks and giant-screen smartphones), the airlines, plane manufacturers and third-party service providers are starting to question the value of traditional IFE systems.

Traditional in-the-seat entertainment systems are beginning to be supplemented and even replaced by systems designed to deliver entertainment wirelessly to passenger's personal electronic devices or in the case of some airlines, tablets that are loaned to passengers for the duration of the flight.

Singapore's Scoot Loves It Some iPads

Singapore Airlines subsidiary Scoot recently launched a new IFE program that rents iPads to economy passengers for S$22 (US$17.65) per flight (free to business-class customers), 'pre-loaded with 50GB of the top movies, TV shows, games and music.'

Scoot representatives declined to go into technical details behind their in-flight systems, but a little math can go a long way in explaining the program's appeal.

The airline operates 402-passenger Boeing 777s. Typically IFEs weigh about 13 pounds, counting equipment in the seatback and underneath the seat. Simply handing every passenger an iPad instead of these on-board systems would save 4,647 pounds or 2.3 tons, per flight. Give or take, depending on how full the flight is.

That's a lot of weight - and more importantly a lot of fuel - to save. (Of course, that doesn't account for the centralized equipment needed to deliver the content to the iPads or the seat-back systems.)

Finally, iPads cost a lot less than the expensive, proprietary systems they would replace.

An iPad in Qantas' Pouch?

Australian carrier Qantas is implementing a similar program on its Boeing 767-300ER fleet. Depending on the configuration of the plane, Quantas can seat anywhere from 228 to 254 passengers on these craft, putting the weight saved from 1.3 to 1.5 tons per full flight.

Based on the fuel burn rate of a Boeing 767-300ER, that comes to around 96.4 pounds of jet fuel saved during every hour of flight at cruise altitude, which is just a smidge more than 14 gallons per hour.

Just to put this into perspective, the longest flight scheduled for this particular aircraft is likely a JFK-Buenos Aires run, which clocks in at 10 hours, 35 minutes. That's about 9.5 hours at cruise, so it's 133 gallons of fuel saved for the trip. At current fuel prices, the savings would add up to $724.85 per flight.

These are very ballpark numbers, of course, since they don't take into account weather and the fact that as planes fly, the burn rate changes since the plane gets lighter as it goes. But given the number of flights per year (one per day, round-trip), a single 767 on this route alone might end up saving $529,140 in fuel costs per year.

An Opposing View

Not everyone is convinced, though, that iPads and similar tablets are the wave of the future for airline IFE.

'These systems are bad, because they take up room and use up space on the tray,' says Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot and author at Ask The Pilot. 'And the mechanics are awkward for first and business class where you have lie-flat seats.'

'In everything I have seen, the emphasis remains on back-of-the-seat systems,' Smith adds, citing several recent cabin designs at airlines like Air France, all of which are offering in-the-seat, big-screen experiences.

This is not the first time airlines have flirted with personal handheld entertainment systems, Smith reminds ReadWriteWeb. Back in the day, TWA and American Airlines used to provide small video consoles on flights that played tapes of movies for passengers. Obviously, that didn't turn out to be the answer.

Not Everyone Wants An iPad

While Smith acknowledges that tablet-based IFEs make for lighter planes, he points out that newer, lighter in-seat IFEs can weigh 80% less than current models, which puts them very near the weight class of a tablet.

On the other hand, it can cost anywhere from $1.5 million to $2.2 million to refurbish a plane with such systems, and they usually incur significant ongoing maintenance costs. Using tablets could help cut those refurbishment and maintenance costs, since tablets can easily be swapped out for repair or replacement.

In addition, airlines have to provide tablets only to actual passengers who didn't already bring their own, and some passengers might not want to watch movies and so would decline the device. Empty seats don't get them, either, saving even more weight and expense.

In classic airline fashion, they'll likely do yield management analysis to precisely calculate how many tablets they'll need for each flight. (If you're the last one to board the plane, you'll have to hope they got their figures right.)

Beyond the iPad

If airlines really are committed to the in-flight tablet path, they may be able to recoup even more savings. Airbus is offering new IFE platforms that will let passengers connect their own devices to the on-board entertainment or connect their tablet's content to the seat-back screen.

That would support the tablet but still let the airline claim some differentiation from its competitors.

For their part, the airlines aren't tipping their hands on their current and future plans. Singapore Airlines, Scoot, and US-based Delta, which is rumored to be trial-running an iPad-based system, all declined to comment for this story.

Roll Your Own

Eventually, with the increase of broadband availability on flights, airlines may not even bother to provide proprietary content at all: passengers will bring their own, or surf online to find their own entertainment. And as tablet penetration continues to increase, more and more passengers will likely tote their own tablets onto the plane.

We may never see this in the air (video below), but with an increasingly connected world, distracting passengers with their own connections and favorite content may become the typical airline flight plan.

It's really up to the passengers to decide. If airlines decide they can't acquire additional passengers or revenue with dedicated seat-back in-flight entertainment systems, they'll happily abandon them for tablets - either the customers' own or rentals/loaners. Similarly, if they can't entice travelers with proprietary content, they'll quickly move on to letting customers bring (or download) their own.

Let's just hope they add power jacks at every seat so the screen doesn't go dark just before you get the most exciting part of that episode of Lost you were watching on your iPad.

 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Airbus and Singapore Airlines.

Why Google Fiber Doesn't Scare Your ISP

Kansas City is about to experience the Internet as it should be. If you're in the right neighborhood, you could be enjoying downloads speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second when Google's pilot project lights up in Kansas and Missouri this September. You might think the Google initiative will force U.S. Internet service providers, which generally deliver downloads speeds a fraction of what the search giant is promising, to finally get their own fiber projects moving. But you'd be wrong. 

The cost of bringing fiber to the home is so high that even the largest ISPs can't afford large-scale deployments. According to the FCC, a typical deployment costs the provider a minimum of $2,500 per subscriber. Google is apparently approaching the project intelligently, and it will probably find a way to cut deployments costs. But there is a limit to what even the Monster of Mountain View can do. 'I don't believe you can turn the economics of fiber on its head,' says Steve Timmerman, senior vice president of ASSIA, which builds management systems for DSL providers.  

The biggest expense is that of running the fiber itself. Digging trenches in an urban environment is labor-intensive. Google is using existing telephone poles to carry its fiber in Kansas City, but that's not possible in many cities and suburbs where utilities have long since moved underground. What's more, cutting deals to use overhead poles and underground cableways could be difficult once the companies that own them come to view Google as a competitor. 

Google, of course, is very large and can use its scale to buy fiber and equipment at excellent prices. But Verizon had the same capability and ultimately lost approximately $800 per subscriber on its fiber deployment, Timmerman says. 

Less tangible, but still significant, is the difficulty of running a consumer business, an area that Google has little experience in. Indeed, when it tried to enter the cell phone business directly with the Nexus One two years ago, it failed miserably. Although carriers like Verizon and AT&T aren't winning any popularity contests, they do have huge networks of highly experienced technicians and customer service people who know how to keep a network running and how to manage a customer base. 

It's also worth noting that AT&T's much-hyped U-verse fiber service isn't purely fiber; it's actually a hybrid of DSL to the pole and fiber from the pole to the home - a cheaper, but slower, alternative to 100% fiber deployment, says ASSIA CEO John Cioffi. DSL still serves 70 percent of broadband customers worldwide, Cioffi notes. 

Will the carriers react to Google's fiber deployment by redoubling their own efforts? That's still unclear. But unless Google succeeds in proving that large-scale fiber deployment is economical, you'll have to move to Kansas City to enjoy those cheap, 1GB downloads.

 

Amazon's Cloud Player Crackdown Punishes Cheapskates

You knew it had to happen, but it still stings. With Amazon's complicated update of its Cloud Player digital music service, the company has made its cloud-based music-locker service much less friendly to users who don't want to pay for a subscription.

Amazon's announcement Tuesday made it sound like the online retail giant was just giving customers what Apple already offered, and more. Steve Boom, vice president of digital music at Amazon, said that the company was delivering 'the best possible customer experience for Cloud Player' - music stored locally on a user's PC would automatically be 'scanned and matched,' placing high-quality, 256-Kilobit-per-second versions within Amazon's Cloud Player.

As before, music purchased from Amazon would be automatically saved to the Cloud Player, and Amazon also announced enhanced support for devices like Roku and Sonos.

Here's the Catch

But buried at the bottom of the release was the catch: now, only music stored within the Cloud Player can be played back online or via a mobile device. And Cloud Player is no longer free - well, it is, but only up through 250 songs. Any more than that, and users will be forced to pay an annual fee of $24.99 for up to 250,000 songs. Granted, that's just a little more than two bucks per month, but still. And who actually owns just 250 songs?

But that's not all.

Now, if you have more than 250 songs stored in Cloud Player, Amazon will automatically give you a month's worth of the premium Cloud Player service. After that, all previously imported music will vanish. Good news, though: you can re-import them!

The problem, of course, is that a year ago, Amazon launched its Cloud Player and Cloud Drive as a unified service. Amazon, in fact, invited consumers to upload their 'entire music collection' to what it then called 'Cloud Drive Music.' And, if customers purchased an MP3 album from Amazon, the Cloud Drive size was automatically upgraded from 5GB to 20GB - for just a year, of course, but who really noticed that fine print? Times were good.

But now Amazon has separated Cloud Drive and Cloud Player into separate subscriptions. There, customers can still store up to 5GB for free, or add additional storage for plans that start at $10 per year for 20GB.

It's Complicated

Here's where it really gets complicated. I was bubbling over with outrage when I emailed Amazon and asked them what would happen to existing MP3 files stored on Cloud Drive. After all, Amazon's Cloud Drive page simply mentions 'photos, documents, and videos'.

But again, it's not that simple. 'Customers can continue to store music files in Cloud Drive, but Cloud Drive no longer has a music player and cannot stream or play music,' an Amazon spokeswoman replied in an email. 'Music that customers previously stored in Cloud Drive will be accessible in both Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Their Cloud Drive 'Music' folder has been renamed 'Archived Music,' and music files that customers previously stored in Cloud Drive will not count against their Cloud Drive storage quota. Going forward, music that customers upload to Cloud Drive will only be accessible in Cloud Drive and will count against their Cloud Drive storage quota, and music files imported to Cloud Player will only be accessible in Cloud Player.

Whew. Which is weird, because that's wrong. On the Web, you can play music directly from the Cloud Drive, using Amazon's Web-based player. But that won't work away from your PC, as there's no mobile version of the Cloud Drive app at all.

Yes, you can view a stored picture. But documents and videos must be downloaded before you can open them.

So, basically, Cloud Drive is now an online repository of files that you can't do anything useful with, really.

All or Nothing

And if that wasn't enough, Amazon has also made downloading music purchased through the site an all-or-nothing proposition, as commenters on The Verge first noted. In other words, Amazon will allow you to dump all of your purchased music onto your mobile device, for example, but not selected tracks. Users have also reported that a bug in Cloud Player now plays each track twice - once from the original upload, and once from the 'scanned and matched' file.

It's pretty apparent that some of the fees Amazon now imposes are designed to cover the costs of the licenses Amazon struck with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, to enable the 'scan and match' capabilities.

But the bizarre song limitations, the odd separation of Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, and the way that Amazon is handling the transition from the old model to the new don't agree with Boom's 'best customer experience' quote.

It's simply indefensible.

An Indictment of Digital Lockers

Amazon's shift is also an indictment of the 'digital locker' strategy, where customers simply uploaded their own music to the cloud. By shifting to a licensed model, the number of big-name digital lockers has been cut to two: Google Music (now Google Play Music) and mSpot's lesser-known service. (I'm not counting Best Buy's Music Cloud service, simply the most horrendous online music service I've ever encountered, or any of the generic cloud storage providers.)

What this probably means, though, is that rocky roads lie ahead for those other two services, and anyone who has uploaded music to them. Google's 20,000-song storage limit within Google Play Music is ideal for most consumers, and mSpot's 5GB free tier is also perfectly acceptable. But Google launched its transition from Google Music Beta to Google Play Music last year with several of Hollywood's record moguls in attendance, and I don't doubt that Google will eventually pursue a similar sort of licensing model to Amazon's in order to tie itself closer to content providers; the recently announced, media-optimized Nexus 7 tablet is proof of that.

As for Apple - a few years ago, the notion of buying DRM-encoded MP3s felt antiquated as MP3s began to be ripped and shared. Apple responded by dropping the DRM restrictions, then led the industry into the cloud with the 'scan and match' capability. It still looked outdated, as the digital locker services launched. Not any more, though. Now, it looks (again) like what the online music store will evolve into, driven by Hollywood.

Convenience Fees?

More and more, subscription services are justifying their monthly fees by simply eliminating the hassle of online file management. At least you know that if a Spotify or MOG goes out of business, you've simply lost access to music you essentially rented. Pandora, Slacker, Spotify and others offer 'radio' options with only limited freedom of choice. Apple has to catch up here.

Although Apple eliminated DRM from its MP3 singles, playing and ripping tracks to the AAC format gives its iTunes platform 'weight' - each track is an additional incremental investment. By encouraging users to upload their digital music library to Amazon, then charging for it, and making the tracks a pain to remove, Amazon has done the same - yet in a much less customer-friendly way.

In effect, you'll have to expend significant time and effort re-uploading content, or else pay to rent the content you already thought you owned.

Convenience: it's such a pain in the ass.

Cartoon: The iPad Is Ready for Working by Hand

A few months ago, Jon Mitchell wrote a great piece that stirred up a lot of discussion about the viability of creating art on tablets with your hands. Although I commented at the time, I've finally drawn a more complete response.

Click for full-sized image.

[Video] 3 Ways Microsoft's Outlook.com is Better Than Gmail

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Hulu Benefits From New Mountain Lion Mirroring Feature

After a painfully long wait, Hulu Plus is available on the Apple TV. Hulu subscribers can stream TV shows and movies from the service on their televisions, just as owners of Rokus, Nintendo Wiis and a list of other devices already do. 

Hulu Plus, the paid-subscription counterpart to free, ad-supported Hulu.com, has been central to television's transition to the Internet, where a small but growing number of viewers turn to watch shows. Apple has sold its streaming box since 2007. The device has been more or less an afterthought for Apple, but the company reportedly has bigger plans to disrupt the TV market with an HD TV of its own. 

Hulu's arrival is milestone for the Apple TV, which suffers from a pretty limited selection of content compared to similar products like Roku and the Boxee Box. The integration was reportedly ready from a technical standpoint last year, but got held up by "political" issues. 

So what took so long? Apple may have been hesitant to let a service that's so competitive with the iTunes Store onto its TV platform. And Hulu, whose revenue is growing but remains relatively small, may have had a hard time swallowing Apple's demand for a slice of revenues from people who sign up for Hulu Plus via the Apple TV. As with Netflix subscribers, Apple TV customers can use their iTunes account to buy Hulu Plus subscriptions. 

Whatever the reasons, Hulu Plus' arrival couldn't have come at a more opportune time for Hulu. Last week, Apple rolled out OS X Mountain Lion, which enables people to mirror their Macs to their televisions using AirPlay and Apple TV. That means anything that displays on the Mac can be viewed on the television, including the free Hulu.com site. 

This has long been possible with iOS devices - Hulu Plus subscribers using AirPlay to shunt shows and movies to their televisions. But, crucially, iPads, iPhones and iPods could never access Hulu.com. Desktop browsers obviously can, so Mountain Lion presents users with the easiest way yet to get Hulu onto their TV sets for free. Of course, anybody can hook up a VGA or HDMI cable to their laptop and watch whatever Internet video they want, but AirPlay saves consumers all that extra trouble. 

 

Why Bing's Facebook Integration Won't Help Most People

On Monday, Microsoft added the capability to 'tag' Facebook friends while searching in Bing, actively soliciting the wisdom of real people when conducting searches. While this sounds like a great idea in theory, it's unlikely to be used except by a majority of users.

That's not to say bringing Facebook to search isn't a good idea. Microsoft's search strategy now leans heavily toward social, and encouraging one's friends to engage via Bing can only help the company's case.

But is it useful? Only in certain situations.

When Does It Help?

Here's where the new announcement fits in. In May, Microsoft redesigned Bing to passively search information from virtually all of a user's social networks. Bing now uses a 'sidebar' to let users optionally search these networks, complementing the results from the main Bing algorithm. At the time, Microsoft said it might launch a future feature called 'Broadcast,' which would actively ask friends on those social networks for advice or answers. That Broadcast feature, specifically for Facebook, went live on Monday.

Specifically, users can 'tag' friends by naming them. When the search is 'submitted,' Bing publishes a query to a user's timeline, asking them, for example, 'Can you recommend the best hiking trails?' for a given area. Bing can tag up to five friends at a time.

What 'Search' Really Means

A quality search engine excels in providing immediacy, relevance and context. The race toward immediacy has largely faded into irrelevance; Google has argued that its Google Instant results save 2 to 5 seconds per search, or 350 million hours of user time per year. Still, users who search via the Internet Explorer or Chrome browsers can find relevant results almost instantly, through previous searches, autosuggested results or through an actual search via toolbar or search field.

And, in a way, that's the issue with Microsoft's tagging feature. Having essentially 'solved' the problem of immediacy, Google and Microsoft have moved on to relevancy (apple trees vs. Apple) and providing context. Both Google and Microsoft now attempt to return 'answers' to common questions, such as the height of the Empire State Building. Context is provided by related searches and, most recently, the social aspects of search.

But every time a friend is asked what his favorite restaurant in New York is, there's an implicit delay. That's not to say that the average Bing user won't have a network of connected, informed enthusiastic friends. It's that this network has to respond almost instantly for the 'immediacy' aspect of the search paradigm to remain in effect.

Do Delays Matter?

Now, does this hesitation matter? For certain searches and certain users, no. If I'm planning a trip to Hawaii, and want to know the best hotel to stay at on Kauai, soliciting my Facebook friends during the planning stages makes sense, especially if I have a buddy who was stationed at Pearl Harbor and may know. But if I have 45 minutes to find the best BBQ joint near the Kansas City airport, I'm not sure that my friends will be the fastest, most reliable source of information.

There's an exception, though. On July 18, Bing added Foursquare results to its social sidebar. Foursquare, Yelp and a number of other social networks publish your opinions for the world to see. They're chiseled in stone, so to speak, and permanently searchable by your friends and others. It may be that my friend Dave has also been grounded in Kansas City, sought out some ribs and posted his experiences on Yelp. In that case, that results of that search would be immediate, relevant and fruitful.

Naturally, Bing - and anyone who uses this new feature - will have to tread carefully about bothering others for answers. Users are already hypersensitive to 'spamming' their friends with pithy updates from Facebook social games and other apps. On the other hand, Microsoft has made the right choice to not automate the social search, instead forcing users to write their own 'query' to their friends, using their own jargon and phrasing. That's an important touch, as it will encourage the recipients to think of the query as a request for assistance, rather than an auto-generated spam message.

Right now, suggesting friends seems to be largely based on location. Still, it's easy to imagine scenarios where you might be in the market for a new car, for example, and your friend across the country already owns the Acura you're considering leasing. Bing needs to know that, however, in order to take advantage of the connection.

Bing vs. Google

Google, meanwhile, offers Search Plus Your World, but nothing that's comparable to the new Bing feature. For one thing, Google's offering focuses almost exclusively on Google+, and performs searches against information there. A user might get lucky while looking for a New York City restaurant recommendation if a Google+ contact happened to have put one in a post, but there's no way to reach out to your contacts. For what it's worth, Bing is head and shoulders above Google in this area.

Microsoft is likely thinking of the problem in a sort of hierarchy of value: Bing can deliver millions of search results, curated for you, which you ultimately select and explore via its search engine. Searching the social networks that you belong to narrows those results and adds value. At the top lies the personal recommendation from your friends, the highest value, but also probably the least timely.

Basically, there's nothing different here than the person who tweets or updates: 'HELP! Need Thai recommendations for the Mission, quick!' or 'So what do you think of the new BMW 3-series?' That person may get lucky and get a timely, useful answer. Or, well, not. And that person doesn't need Bing to do it, either.

To take advantage of Bing's new social element when you really need it, though, it helps to have lots of friends with many, many opinions - and who have already published them for Bing to find.