[madeofpalk]

Seperate annecdote - I worked on an inflight satelite wifi project and I was surprised at how well both Youtube and Netlifx worked over a medium-bandwidth/high-latency connection.

Granted, we had specific QoS/traffic shaping to improve reliability without gobbling up all the bandwidth (stream Netflix was an advertised feature of the wifi service), but it still seemed like magic.

[seized]

When Plex rolled out it's auto quality/auto bandwidth adjustment it actually worked very well over airplane satellite wifi as well. I watched a few things from my own server.

I'm amazed that service allowed streaming though...

[ketzo]

For a good few years, a lot of airlines had Netflix and Hulu throttled on their free WiFi services, but not Twitch, so I’d just watch videogames on all my flights. My theory (which I really believe is true) is that they just hadn’t heard of it, and hadn’t blacklisted it!

[kalleboo]

YouTube has gotten way better in the past couple of years. When they first launched DASH streaming, it was terrible on high-latency international connections. If a US-based content creator uploaded a video and you were the first to view it in your region, you could actually notice how it was populating the CDN and it was unwatchable without disabling DASH and using the old-fashioned buffered player. These days it's flawless for me in nearly every situation.

[closeparen]

Wow! You actually stream Netflix to an airplane? I always guessed that inflight VOD services had the movies stored in a server on the plane.

[judge2020]

Things like the Delta “gogo in-flight entertainment” do store their movies on the plane, but people will want to watch their Netflix/Prime/etc content on the plane as well.

[madeofpalk]

Both.

There’s “inflight entertainment” where all the movies/shows are indeed stored locally on the plane, with either seatback or custom/white label streaming app for BYOD.

But in addition they were advertising streaming Netflix and YouTube over the satellite WiFi.