[ericraio]

Let’s not forget that this could be a value add, they can easily increase flight ticket prices by $20 and offer the service for free. They can also remove inflight monitors from the planes, reducing the weight of the overall plane, increase plane tickets by $10 and offer it Free. There’s many ways to play with the numbers

[esskay]

Not sure they'd need to go as far as removing the IFE completely, but a vastly more simple and cheap system could be used instead.

Airlines still rely on those massive clunky boxes under each seat, plus a server rack which adds a fair bit of weight.

Swapping to an all-in-one system - essentially a smart tv built into each monitor that just provides a browser and basic apps for major streaming services would reduce the overall weight of the plane, fix the annoyance of that big box where your legs are supposed to go, and provide entertainment on board.

There's also the costs that airlines normally have for licensing content - those would go away completely if everyone can just log into their own netflix or prime account.

[ericraio]

My comment was just a quick idea and what you wrote is well put!

[bruce511]

They could add around $3 per ticket and pay for it.

But removing seat-back would be bold - 100 people using a shared 350 connection would probably not work well. 200-odd using it would kill it. Leaving your passengers with a very unhappy experience.

[Bedon292]

Plenty of flights in the US are BYOD already. You connect to the WiFi and have access to a website (on a laptop) or it's in their app on mobile. And it has video on demand served locally from the plane. It's airline edits with watermarks but a good enough selection I wouldn't expect most people to pay for Internet for streaming.

And on top of that all the major streaming services allow for download for offline viewing. I'm just going to download a bunch of stuff ahead of time to make sure I can watch what I want.

This just serves the folks who want to pay to access the rest of the Internet. And I don't see incentive for anyone to pay and try to use a streaming service. More useful for someone traveling on business needing to join a call or something.

[bubblethink]

> can also remove inflight monitors

350 Mbps for the entire flight. You're looking at speeds in the 5 Mbps territory optimistically per person. No way can you remove a NAS serving video content with that.