Welcome to another installment of Beyond Entertainment, where we delve into the latest innovations and trends in the aviation industry. In this episode, Andy Masson sits down for a chat with Josh Marks, CEO of Anuvu. Masson and Marks explore how changing passenger preferences are transforming in-flight entertainment (IFE) and connectivity.
Airlines Have Diverse IFE Requirements
Marks explained that some airlines have incredibly diverse requirements for IFE. For example, they must be responsive to the needs of younger customers, like Gen Z, who prefer short-form, episodic content. Older passengers, however, may prefer to watch long-form content like movies.
Airlines must overlay these diverse content preferences with regionalization requirements concerning subtitles, dubbing, and editing. To delight all customers and satisfy these requirements, there needs to be a vast amount of content available.
Content Delivery Models Must Evolve
Content is typically loaded onto an aircraft once a month, but edge caching could help accelerate this process. With edge caching, you can pre-load the relevant content in advance. This is technologically possible today, but the process is still complicated. Marks argued that content has to get closer to the aircraft for faster delivery to truly be possible.
One example of how this works is with content distribution networks (CDNs). When you stream content, it doesn’t live directly on that device. Rather, it is stored and served up by a CDN near you. Marks recommended that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as Panasonic Avionics, and CSPs move toward this model.
Innovating the Content Value Chain
As Masson pointed out, a CSP functions a bit like FedEx. A CSP must send a courier to pick up the file from the studio, bring it to their warehouse, manually process the content, localize it with subtitles, edit it, and transcode it for the various systems on board the aircraft. Then, the CSP has another courier send the finished product to the OEM, who loads it onto the aircraft.
Marks envisions a new model in which content owners pre-position the content into the channel, so CSPs can localize it in advance. Then, the content is placed in a digital asset library that’s fully integrated with OEMs. This way, as soon as the IFE system detects that a passenger is interested in a piece of content, it can immediately draw that content over to the aircraft either via the airport’s Wi-Fi connection or over the top (OTT) using satellite connectivity.
