For the past several months, I have had difficulty getting IFE videos to play on my Windows 10 laptop with any consistency. On some flights, everything works great. On most flights, all I get is a blank screen once the commercial finishes playing. I tried Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera. I uninstalled add-ons and extensions. I installed a fresh copy of Windows in a VM. Nothing.

On a flight this past weekend, I looked at the browser console and noticed that something hadn't loaded because of an expired security certificate. Once I browsed to the site and accepted the invalid certificate, the movie played.

Could this have been the problem? If so, why would the IFE work occasionally?