HAMBURG — IFE grand maison Thales used the occasion of the Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg to reveal its new FlytEDGE digital IFE solution, which leverages its Crystal Cabin Award-winning Onboard Data Center and a partnership with Netskrt Systems to enable cloud-based content management and onboard edge caching, in a bid to further facilitate streaming content partnerships between airlines and OTT providers, and enhance the passenger experience.
For the uninitiated, edge caching in the inflight context gives the ability to store new information (e.g. streaming video) locally after it has been accessed online by a passenger. This ensures that when other users on the flight want to watch the same content, it does not have to be ferried over the costly inflight connectivity pipe each subsequent time, allowing the airline to rapidly provide access.
“No matter how many people watch the same content, each title only streams once to the plane’s onboard cache,” says Thales.
Airlines will be able to increase their inflight entertainment content through collaborations with content streaming providers like Amazon or Hulu, whilst passengers will be able to access more content faster, Thales Inflyt CEO TK Kallenbach and vice president Kurt Weidemeyer explained to RGN.
The solution is also capable of preemptively storing information that the system manager believes will be accessed by users in the near future.
The concept works like this. An airline partners with a streaming provider to edge cache their content on board, either in-flight via satellite or on the ground, using gate Wi-Fi or a 5G connection.
Thales assumes that 80-90% of traffic to any streaming provider is in fact accessing 10-15% of the latest content, so airlines can work with their content provider to ensure that this content is always available in real time.
Notably, passengers can avail of a series on the ground, in the lounge for example. When they log into their streaming provider account in-flight, the system will immediately play the next episode for them.
It is worth noting that whilst passengers can stream content via the OTT apps on their smart phones and other devices, airlines can also offer this service via their IFE systems, expanding the opportunities to develop brand partnerships with content providers beyond loading seasonal content to the onboard server.
Thales’ relationship with Netskrt is key. Netskrt is a leading provider of edge Content Delivery Networks (eCDNs) for streaming video services and is contributing to FlytEDGE’s system by providing:
- Edge caching for streaming without buffering or overloading the IFC system
- Cloud-based content management that ensures the most popular content is available on every plane, using digital distribution and intelligent content curation
- New possibilities for passenger entertainment, including viewing live sport events onboard, without impacting email, browsing, or other viewing and communications
Whilst FlytEDGE has a ton of promise, and indeed was developed to address airlines’ stated interests, questions remain over certain aspects of delivering this kind of content, most notably around geo-blocking, which restricts access to Internet content based upon the user’s geographical location. This means that certain data stored on the aircraft would only be available in certain areas, which would be made more complicated by streaming sites that only offer some content in certain markets despite being on the same platform.
Thales’ position is that it will be down to the content providers and airlines to discuss how to move the needle here (which may, as a speculative point from this journalist, end up looking like bespoke licensing agreements that reduce cached content to only that which is available worldwide).
Although Thales has led with advanced IFE/streaming capabilities as part of its announcement, the firm also outlined other opportunities for FlytEDGE in the future. For example, the system allows for fast updates of GUIs either in the air or on the ground which airlines could use to offer promotions or changes to menus to meet specific requirements for individual flights.
Thales has also announced a future partnership with Ubisoft to deliver new content to passengers that maximises the capabilities of FlytEDGE.
Weidemeyer tells RGN that the Airline Passenger Experience Association’s work and liaison relationship with the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA) “was helpful in terms of informing design decisions to achieve our caching objectives. When selecting Netskrt as our collaborator to provide content caching, their involvement with SVTA was also an important criteria for us.”
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Featured image credited to Thales