How is it that we're four pages into this thread and no one has yet referred to this as an "enhancement"?
In principle, I'm extremely annoyed at this. I don't mind it especially in Y, but in J, come on. The few measly pennies that they're going to generate per flight are vastly outweighed by the annoyance it causes to the customers. (I'm actually curious how much revenue AC generates from ads, which it doesn't disclose in its financials).
In practice, I don't know that it really matters. Like
zorn, I generally queue up the VOD while reading something, so I don't usually watch the ads anyway.
Interesting idea from
jaysona to make IFE more of a PPV and not include it in the base fare. I thought
Nitehawk's idea was perhaps more interesting though. I can't see a lot of people being willing to shell out $20 or something big for IFE, but pay a buck or two to have ad-less IFE, that I can see being fairly popular.
24left, some good insights. But I'm curious, with regards to frequency, how much is too much? I feel like a lot of the ads that AC runs get repeated so often that they're actually creating ill will, at least with those of us who fly a lot. And what's the right balance? I feel like 90 seconds of ads isn't bad for watching a movie or maybe even a TV show, but if we have to suffer through 3 minutes of junk to watch a 20-minute TV show, I feel like that also might cross the line.
PLeblond, you've hit on one of my big pet peeves. I think they may have dialed it back a bit now, but I remember going to see movies 5-10 years ago where there were ~10 minutes of ads and 10+ minutes of previews. By the time, the movie finally started playing, I was in a bad mood and sometimes had even forgotten what I went to see. Or I would just show up late so I could miss the ads, which I think a lot of people were doing.