Hello Frank,
I had an interesting experience with "in-flight" bandwidth ...
I just flew to Singapore and back on Singapore Airlines. On these flights, and many of the newer planes and flights, each seat included its own "seat-back" TV for watching a variety of programming. I have used this before on JetBlue flights to New York where they offer dozens of channels of satellite TV. On the flight over to Singapore I was reading the book Blink, and did some catching up on magazines, and so I never did turn on the TV. I did, from time to time, hear people snicker or laugh and glanced over to see one of the various new movie releases playing on someone elses TV.
On the way back from Singapore, I was tired of reading and completing work on my laptop, and so I thought I would check out the movie system. I first grabbed the in-flight guide and saw there were 60 different movies - besides the various TV programming that was being offered. Out of the 60 films, at least half of them were Hollywood flicks ... some new, some older. The other half of the movies were international movies. I turned on the TV, put on my headset, and started to cruise through the channels. On each movie that I came to, a small display appeared on the screen for a few seconds that told me how far into the movie it was. I found a movie that was only 10 minutes in, and started to watch.
As I was sitting in my seat, I accidently squashed the controller - which pops out of the armrest - and suddenly the movie started to fast-forward! WHAT? I was shocked. I hit pause ... and the movie paused. I hit rewind ... and it quickly returned to where I had been watching. I hit rewind again and went back all the way to the beginning of the movie. I had no idea that each person had complete control of the movie they were watching!
I'm not sure how this is done, and how much control is being given, however I was impressed. I was able to pause to go to the lavatory, and when I was done watching one show I could go to another and simply rewind to the beginning! I could not find a way to simply "stop" the movie and restart it from the beginning, however rewinding worked.
What is amazing to me is that for this level of control to be given, there must be some impressive bandwidth within the plane, and they must count on the fact that most people would not do this. If not, then there is even more intelligence in the system than I would have thought. Not only would the system have to keep track of each person and what they were watching, it would have to be able to send the appropriate content to the appropriate person at the appropriate time. Or the TV displays have the ability to buffer the movies?
In any case ... I have to admit that I was impressed ... nice system. I am baffled at how they are able to provide such individual control ...
Scott C. Lemon |
