French firm Airmont has long supported aviation clients, including in the VVIP realm by providing advanced compression technology to optimize inflight video streaming services.
Now, on the eve of the 2025 NBAA Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition in Las Vegas, Airmont founder and executive chairman Jean-François Gault is providing details about a new strategic relationship that sees Airmont integrate JetVision by DIRECTV into its service portfolio, and bring it to private aircraft operating both domestically and on international roundtrips to and from the United States. Airmont has already established US offices.
Designed exclusively for the business aviation community, JetVision by DIRECTV is a relatively new IPTV solution from DIRECTV IN FLIGHT and enables operators to avail of breaking news, live major sporting events, weather, TV shows and movies on aircraft cabin displays through application streaming players like Roku and Apple TV+ and on personal devices.
Under the new arrangement, Airmont has acquired retransmission rights for broadcasting JetVision by DIRECTV on board business jets, and will apply its proprietary optimization technologies to the service offering. Content rights covered under JetVision by DIRECTV extend to aircraft “flying in US territories and those flying to and from” the US, Gault confirmed to Runway Girl Network.
Airmont’s technologies “help reduce bandwidth consumption per stream, minimize the number of live feeds opened on the Internet, and guarantee smooth playback from takeoff to landing,” DIRECTV IN FLIGHT said in a statement. “Operators and private aircraft owners will also benefit from stream supervision tools, which allow them to monitor user experience for improved support efficiency.”
Live sporting events are a major draw for passengers, whether flying private or commercial. JetVision by DIRECTV boasts over 90 channels from its domestic channel lineup plus access to premium sports add-ons like NFL Sunday Ticket via EverPass, and NBA League Pass®.
For international flights to and from the US, the service now boasts over two dozen US-based networks including programming such as NFL Network, NFL RedZone, news and business, as well as Spanish-language content from Telemundo and Univision. This bolstered lineup stems from DIRECTV IN FLIGHT’s decision to expand programming to international flights earlier this year. Airmont can also create tailored TV channel packages to meet bizjet operators’ unique needs.
DIRECTV IN FLIGHT’s agreement with Airmont is well timed — Ku- and Ka-band cabin connectivity has never been more important to business aircraft operators and they’ve never had more options than right now as new broadband solutions take to the skies including Gogo’s Galileo service, as powered by Eutelsat OneWeb’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network, and SpaceX’s LEO service Starlink.
Using compression technology, even for low-latency links, makes sense: it increases throughput by shrinking data and improves transfer performance. It is also more cost effective, significantly reducing the megabytes required per hour. The protocol optimization also provided by Airmont, meanwhile, is designed to ensure the quality remains excellent even under fluctuating conditions. “And our experience is that some protocols are much more suited than the traditional streaming protocol in order to provide reliability,” Gault said.
Won’t passengers simply seek to avail of their own streaming subscriptions over these high-spreed connections, you might ask? In some scenarios that might be perfectly fine (though there is now some legal uncertainty around whether content rights that are presently balanced within a terrestrial framework extend to the inflight realm — most especially when traveling abroad and overseas.)
But Gault urged us to consider a scenario where an NBA team is flying on a chartered private jet and all the players want to watch the same TV channel — such as ESPN. It makes sense to enable a single video stream to serve multiple users simultaneously, as opposed to supporting multiple separate streams. This also frees up bandwidth for other usages.
“This is why we say we have three parts for optimization: the compression, the protocol optimization, and the Multi-User which allows this neutralization of streams,” Gault explained.
And because Airmont has been delivering commercial services for inflight live TV since 2019 “we have proven our value in delivering live TV in a way where the passengers are very pleased,” he said. Rather fascinatingly, Airmont can also use lower-bandwidth L-band pipes as a “very good” back up whenever a Ku- or Ka-band connection is briefly lost.
If JetVision by DIRECTV is on board, passengers will naturally gravitate to the service. That’s because Airmont’s architecture enables access to be simplified by scanning a QR code, for instance, or through a dedicated portal.
“The architecture requires a Gateway, viewers, and a remote control,” Gault noted. And in many instances, a software upgrade is all that’s required for large and VVIP aircraft that already carry an unused AVDS board in the commonly used video distribution system from Innovative Advantage. “Innovative Advantage, as an example, is installed on many Gulfstreams,” Gault noted of the firm’s hardware aboard the popular family of bizjets.
“But there are also other possibilities,” he said, noting that Airmont can work with Honeywell’s GDR, the GoDirect Router, with “a configuration update, and the same with DPI Labs’ hardware. So that’s the three partners that we can work with at this time.” Aircraft retrofits can also be supported.
Airmont is also open to forging new partnerships, including with airlines as its technology can scale. “We created our company in North Carolina in July. So it’s very satisfactory. We will grow and become a US company as well. So that’s a great, great satisfaction,” the Airmont executive said.
Related Articles:
