Originally Posted by nick04

An apt topic for my first post - as part of my job I do some consulting work for one of the main IFE providers.

With a number of new aircraft suffering multi-year delays (the 787, particularly), there are a large number of IFE systems simply sitting on shelves waiting for the planes to be built. These systems are already 2, maybe even 3 years out of date by the time they go into service.

The downside of this is they tend to lag behind what you might expect for technology at the time. The upside is there's a lot of time to fix and modify issues in those systems. So new systems certainly do get rigorous testing and go through a wide-ranging certification programme.

But with BA we're not talking about a new system: it's based on 10, 15 year old technology, that was retrofitted onto 'traditional' IFE systems that date back nearly 20 years.

There are all sorts of exciting developments in IFE that are coming forward that will significantly change the experience for passengers: all of the big players are now moving to Android based systems, so you can expect a much more modern experience on a platform that is widely adopted (so there is more development and technical experience available to work on Android IFE systems).

Another big problem with IFE systems has been the need to 'retrofit' them into the seats, which is also changing as IFE manufacturers work with seat makers to build systems directly into the seats (I think BA has done this on the new WT and WT+ cabins, but I'm not 100% sure).

The sad fact is that BA's system is just by design very complex. Every seat needs to be wired back to the IFE server, which is complex and time-consuming. And you might think that WiFi was the answer, but whilst internet access is one thing there are significant problems involved if you have 200 passengers trying to all stream high-quality video at the same time in what is basically a metal tube.

This is not to excuse BA's AVOD system, which is significantly behind the times and definitely unreliable - but I think it's interesting to look at how BA's system came about, and how perhaps that explains some of the unreliability.

The good news is that the upcoming generation of systems are actually doing a fair bit to tackle this reliability problem - for example, on internet connected aircraft engineers on the ground and even isolate and diagnose IFE problems remotely, letting the cabin-crew get on with other things.