IFE - Stephan Segraves

Bluetooth Audio on Planes is Real and it’s Spectacular

October 24, 2022 ssegraves

I recently flew on a couple of United’s newer planes in the domestic fleet, a 737 MAX 8 and a MAX 9. The MAX 8, tail number N27267, was delivered to United in August and it still had that new plane smell. It also had United’s new inflight entertainment system, including Bluetooth audio for passengers to use to listen to the movies or television that were watching on their screen. I decided to give it a shot and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.

You simply flip the switch for Bluetooth audio and put your device in pairing mode. A few seconds later it is connected and you’re listening wirelessly. For me, the biggest annoyance was that with my Apple Airpods Pro 2 had to be manually set to pair by holding the rear button, essentially wiping out the pairing information with my phone. I am not sure if this is my error or a flaw in how the Airpods pair but it was a small inconvenience.

The audio quality while enjoyable was not high quality. It actually didn’t sound any better than simply plugging wired headphones in. There was a slight static in the background and for scenes with music, it was definitely missing some bass. Part of me thinks this is a result of how the content on these systems is stored, likely highly compressed to save space. It could also be simply an interference issue. With Bluetooth being at every seat, that’s a lot of potential radio interference very close to you. Again, this wasn’t a huge downside for me. Being able to use hardware I already use everyday means I can carry less and it just worked. I’m really glad I got the chance to try it out!

One interesting quirk is that they can’t pipe PA announcements over Bluetooth and specifically ask you to remove the headphones when an announcement comes on.

Have you had a chance to try Bluetooth on United or another carrier? What was your experience like?

What United Should Prioritize Over Free DirecTV

January 30, 2019 ssegraves

United announced today that they will be offering free DirecTV service on all 211 Boeing 737s that have the television service.

Just in time for the Big Game, United Airlines today announced that effective immediately more than 100 channels of live television will now be free on 211 Boeing 737 United aircraft equipped with seat back TV, making viewing easy gate-to-gate. In addition to offering free live DIRECTV at more than 30,000 seats, United customers also have access to hundreds of movies and TV shows available on personal devices through the airline’s collection on the United app – offering customers thousands of hours of programming in total.

While it’s a great news release (American Airlines is doing something similar for the “big game”) it glosses over the fact that United is actively removing the DirecTV equipment from the 737s that are going in for new seats or heavy maintenance. I have not heard details but I do believe the plan is to go to an all personal device streaming setup eventually. This is really an interim step on the way to that goal.

What United really should be focused on is getting Wi-Fi working consistently on their domestic fleet. I have been on a number of flights the last few months where the Wi-Fi has either not worked or been so slow that it was not worth using. I rarely watch any of the live television programming while flying, opting instead to turn it to the inflight map channel. I use my time on planes to read or catch up on work and for the latter, I need working internet. The internet service domestically on United has been abysmal. The international planes, in my experience, have fewer Wi-Fi problems, though I have had a few long flights where the internet was not working from the beginning.

It is one reason I have steered clear of United’s year long Wi-Fi subscription. I am not going to invest cash in something that does not reliably work and that cannot be easily refunded on a per flight basis. A subscription service is great in theory for people who are frequent travelers and United’s pricing for it isn’t awful. But my guess is that the people who have purchased it have not been happy. While Delta and Alaska Wi-Fi on GoGo may not be the fastest, for the most part it works all of the time. That’s the reliability I and others want with United’s inflight internet.

United needs to focus their attention on some of the basic things that makes their product worth flying rather than trying to match Delta in hopes to lure a few more customers with shiny things. I want on-time performance, good schedules, working Wi-Fi, and friendly customer service. Everything else is icing on the cake.

The Real Reason Netflix Won’t Offer Offline Downloads

September 8, 2015 ssegraves

From Gerald Lynch’s piece at Gizmodo:

Offline downloads are perhaps the most often requested, “holy grail” feature of TV and movie streaming services, and while Netflix may be the leading provider, it’s Amazon and its Prime Instant Video service that’s become the first to offer it. Netflix however remains firm in its stance that it’s not going to offer offline downloads through its mobile applications, even in the face of competition from its rival. But why?

According to Neil Hunt, Netflix’s Chief Product Officer, Netflix users won’t be able to handle the complexity the added choice will bring.

“I still don’t think it’s a very compelling proposition,” said Hunt, speaking to Gizmodo UK at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin.

As I write this at 34,000 feet over Montana, all I can say is, I don’t buy it.

The biggest use case for downloaded content is air travel. Airlines have been extremely quick at installing WiFi and some of these systems even offer streaming content, but basic WiFi service is still the norm and just about every service out there that I have seen blocks streaming content from Netflix, Amazon, etc. On top of that more airlines are moving to a model where streaming movies and TV hosted on an onboard server are paid content only. The recourse for customers is to download that content before a flight.

About six months ago I made a comment on Twitter about how I wished Amazon would allow downloads of video content on non-Fire devices. There was, and still is, a large amount of video content that I would like to enjoy and now I can, even when flying. Add people who don’t want to eat up their data plan or don’t have access to an LTE network from time to time and the number of those who could benefit from downloads starts to increase dramatically.

The argument that downloads would be too complex seems to me to be a cop-out. An easy way to avoid the discussion. People will take notice and eventually Netflix will have to offer downloads or some variant of them.

Lufthansa’s New Entertainment Option – In Testing

January 24, 2013 ssegraves

On Monday I flew Lufthansa between Budapest and Munich on one of their Airbus 320 aircraft (registration D-AIPP). When I sat down I started looking through their magazine and noticed an extra insert in the seatback pocket. On the insert was a description of the new in-flight entertainment system that is being tested and how to use it on this particular flight. I read through and downloaded the required application for my iPhone, called “my mediaworld”, to test it out. I registered the application (required before using the system) and was all set.

The system works off of a wireless signal that starts transmitting as the aircraft passes through 10,000 feet. You select the network and launch the app. You are presented with a number of options including WatchEnjoy (television, movies, etc.), ListenRelax (music, spoken work), eJournals (newspapers, magazines), and FlyLufthansa (flight information).

I played with each of the options just to see what was provided. The only one that did not really work for me was the magazines and periodicals section. I could never get it to actually load. I ended up selecting a movie to watch and it immediately started playing. The video quality was great and there was no lagging video artifacts that one usually sees with streaming video.

When I watched a few of the TV shows, they were only in German and there was no option to for subtitles. Not having subtitles was a little disappointing, but they are a German airline so having such content isn’t all that surprising.

The video quality was just as good as what you would have if you downloaded the content yourself.

There is also an inflight moving map that shows your current position and a few flight statistics. The application launches the web browser, in my case Safari, and presents the flight data and map there. Great information if you’re an aviation nerd like me.

One of the neatest features is that when an announcement is being made over the aircraft’s intercom, the system pauses the content you are in. I was still a little sick and could not hear well enough to tell if the sound from the intercom was being piped through my headphones as well.

Overall it’s a very cool system and if this is the direction that United is headed with their inflight entertainment, passengers will be very happy. The only concern I had with the Lufthansa system was the lack of power ports in their short haul product. If you are doing some of their longer flights on a short haul aircraft, there are no power ports. Heck, even on Lufthansa’s new A380, there are no power ports in coach, meaning you’ll only be able to watch content until you run out of juice.

This really is the future of inflight entertainment and it’s good news for passengers. No more giant content boxes under the seat in front of you, no more watching movies on a tiny screen three rows in front of you, and no more watching the same content over and over on a loop.

Next time you are on a Lufthansa flight, be sure and check the inflight magazine, you may just have a wireless content delivery system installed on the aircraft (currently, this particular A320 is the only one with the system)! Also, I have included a few more screenshots of the product below. Lufthansa also has a full description of the “my mediaworld” system and available content on their website.