Seatback IFE Screens Enter The Cloud-Based Era

MIAMI—Seatback inflight entertainment (IFE) systems are beginning to look less like traditional airline hardware and more like connected smart TVs, and passenger expectations are rapidly evolving as a result.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Aviation Festival Americas conference in Miami on June 4, Thales InFlyt Experience CTO Tudy Bedou described the next generation of IFE as increasingly cloud native, app driven and personalized, moving away from the slower, highly customized systems that historically dominated airline cabins.

“Legacy systems were kind of stuck a little bit into an older paradigm,” Bedou said. Airlines previously had to develop custom applications specifically for each IFE platform, often resulting in long development cycles and difficult software updates.

Streaming platforms like Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ have become key platforms in this world, while YouTube also has become a major area of focus. “We’re working with Google on YouTube as well,” the CTO revealed. Netflix, with its own strict eco-system, is “more complicated,” he said. This will lead to a broader array of content and potentially lower content licensing costs as viewers rely increasingly on their own subscriptions.

Rather than fully replacing traditional onboard content systems, however, Bedou sees a hybrid future in which airlines balance locally stored content with streaming and connected applications. Connectivity has improved dramatically with low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks, he said, but airlines still need systems capable of functioning when aircraft temporarily lose connectivity. “It’s paramount that we can still provide all the same services to the passengers whether there is active connectivity or not,” Bedou said.

Thales’ new FlytEDGE works with this integrated, mainstream web-based applications’ environment directly, Bedou noted. “It’s really about time to market. It’s about being able to roll out applications that are developed for the web,” he said.

Personalization is also becoming more central to the onboard experience. Thales is developing recommendation engines capable of tailoring entertainment, destination information and revenue generating ancillary services to individual passengers based on previous flights, viewing habits and travel profiles.

The company also sees major opportunities in live sports and interactive programming. At the recent Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, Thales demonstrated concepts that allow passengers to simultaneously follow multiple live sporting events, view real time statistics and navigate between personalized content streams during flights. “I think there is tremendous value in this kind of experience, especially in marquee sports like the Olympics, soccer World Cup and NFL,” Bedou said.

Future proofing has become critical as airlines seek to avoid expensive full system replacements every few years. Rather than replacing entire onboard servers, Bedou explained, airlines will be able to swap out individual processing or memory modules as technology evolves.

Supply chain pressures that have bedeviled cabin interior suppliers remain an issue, though not necessarily where expected. One of the biggest bottlenecks, he said, is memory chips that are being increasingly consumed by massive AI data centers. “A lot of the memory is being swallowed by all those AI data centers,” Bedou said. “It’s getting complicated and expensive.”