In-flight movie screen is going extinct

Airlines view entertainment on shorter flights as best delivered wirelessly

Book a domestic flight on any of the Big Three US airlines, and you won’t be sure whether the seat in front of you has a screen. Some do, while most don’t. Eventually maybe none will.
 
The proliferation of iPhones, iPads and Android devices, in tandem with increasingly reliable in-flight Wi-Fi, has led to a profound shift by many airlines, which now view entertainment on shorter flights as best delivered wirelessly, without the expense or hassles posed by screens.
 
As with most things on an airplane, the determining factor is poundage. Planting a screen in each seat adds weight, which burns additional fuel, which costs more money. On top of that, the screens have a tendency to break as people poke and punch them — often to the annoyance of the passenger in front of them. Today, the new kid on the block for in-flight entertainment, or IFE, is personal-device entertainment — the ability to stream TV and movies to passenger gadgets from a server on the plane. This video is typically free, although United still charges as much as $7.99 to watch live television channels on planes equipped with DirecTV.

 

“For domestic flights, I really do see the industry trending toward streaming IFE,” said Jason Rabinowitz, director of airline research at Routehappy Inc, a New York company that tracks airline amenities. “It’s cheap for airlines to install, there’s no wiring, no weight penalty. These systems can be installed virtually overnight, and the costs to maintain these things are virtually nothing.”
 
The airlines ask why install seat-back monitors that will be obsolete in a few years?
 
Only two of the national US airlines, JetBlue Airways Corp and Virgin America, still have seat-back screens on all of their aircraft. The rest have a mix of both options, given the collections of new and older aircraft in their domestic fleets. Southwest Airlines Co deployed streaming content in 2009 and has never purchased a seat with a video screen. “What we really wanted to do was stay away from the seat screen, even back then,” said Tara Bamburg, Southwest’s manager of mobility, inflight entertainment, and Wi-Fi. “We foresaw as much as anyone could that customers are going to continue to travel with their devices.” 

 
The largest carrier, American Airlines Group Inc, surprised many in the industry when it recently decided to forgo video screens on 100 new Boeing 737 Max airplanes. American said more than 90 percent of its customers carry a device when they fly, so it just made sense. Its first new Max 737s arrive later this year, around the time Southwest plans to begin flying its own. American also hinted that its future single-aisle aircraft will omit video screens, even though it has 40 Airbus A321s and 737s already in the pipeline that will still have them.
 
“Those phones and tablets are continually upgraded, they’re easy to use, and most importantly they are the technology that our customers have chosen,” the airline said in an internal note.