FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Is the movie selection getting worse on BA ?
Old Dec 2, 2013, 1:26 pm
  #8  
Sixth Freedom
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Join Date: May 2007
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Almost every Bond film was featured in August too. I watched Thunderball on the way to SIN and Tomorrow Never Dies on the way back. See my TR for more about this trip.

Towards the end of my time at QR I spend a period working extensively with the IFE team to revitalise and rejuvenate our offering, as part of which I discovered several interesting things. If memory serves, these included:

i) English language films made available by Hollywood are a constraining factor in IFE and each month almost every airline offers the same 'latest releases' and there is not that much variety across the industry in 'classics' either

ii) it generally costs proportionally much more per film to have all the films of a particular series than to have all except one or two (QR offers only 7 of 8 Harry Potters at any one time for this reason and I expect that BA does not quite offer every James Bond)

iii) one of the most interesting discriminators between operators is non-English language options; at QR this was an area that we were keen to boost - EK, who proudly boast about their IFE, do not actually offer that many more English language films than competitors (although they do offer a few more) but they do have an excellent range of non-English films

iv) the most popular choice of English language films watched by passengers is 'action', followed by 'comedy' - we had an interesting debate about whether a long tail was more important than more choice among the most popular genres

v) due to the Hollywood availability constraint for new films the only field where operators can vary the balance of genres is in the non-new releases and system capacity is a critical issue here because operators tend to fill up with all the new releases first; I seem to recall that BA had comparatively few actions and comedies to competitors and relatively more romances, thrillers etc... in the data I collected.

Last edited by Sixth Freedom; Dec 2, 2013 at 1:35 pm
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