Portable AVOD player
 

I was wondering if a portable AVOD player will be the next best thing to the IFE system whereby it will take the channels of the airline IFE system and broadcast it via WiFi to your personal AVOD player or IPAD which would have a larger screen than the Y product.

Personally I see such a player also include Slingbox so when you pay for WiFi it would allow you to watch TV from your home system while flying so you won't miss that game over the Atlantic.

It would be cool to be able to listen to XM Sirus Radio using the player while flying as well in addition to your I Tunes Library or Windows Media Player library from your home system in addition to the Airline Channels being broadcasted.

The software would ask what airline you are flying and pull the data from the airline system using the WiFi would broadcast the programs to you.

A portable video player / tablet computer may be "the next best thing" compared to in-seat IFE and it's nice to have, but

DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT INTERNET STREAMING!

...I guess people are spoilt by massive bandwidth at homes nowadays and get more and more ignorant over others in public places.

What kind of Dataconnection is possible in flight? [Update: A quick Google search reveals that "Gogo" for example offers approximately 3Mbit/s - for a whole plane! You can easily hog 1 Mbit - 1.5 Mbit by watching 1 high quality video stream!]

At home I got 64 Mbit and can do whatever I want, but I think it's very rude to

- Download
or
- Stream Media

in low bandwidth public places... I find it horribly disturbing to find myself in a hotel lobby or airline lounge, waiting minutes to transfer a few KB of E-Mails while I see others watching Hulu etc. Are people really that media addicted? If I want videos on a trip, I download them upfront at home and bring them with me. On the road, I usually use bandwidth for work and would appreciate if other people were a bit more considerate about others, potentially having slightly more important things to get done, than catching up with the latest episode of NCIS...

The great thing about technology is: TV and Radio (like Sirius) are actually transmitted by Satellites! Rather than expecting 100+ people to stream individual content over the internet, Airlines could (and maybe will eventually) offer Live TV / Radio in flight. Oman Air for example pioneered this in 2008.

I just find it way easier to download/rip whatever I need at home and put it on my netbook/laptop/touchpad. The quality will always be a ton better and I get exactly what I want to see.

Westjet in Canada did this way before 2008. Personally, it didn't work for a lot of folks because you were locked to watching whatever was on during your flight time.

Keep in mind that AA's implementation of streaming VOD with GOGO requires the deployment of a fileserver on the airplane, so the media you are streaming is from the galley not from ground-based servers.

It is quite a clever concept. The entire NetFlix library fits in about 2 cabinets of floor space, so a 5 or 6 u fileserver could be configured to hold probably 15-20 TB of data, enough to store thousands of hours of non-HD video (and at 30,000 feet, we can all give up our HD for better selection). When you take in to account that redundancy and high availability aren't that important for an environment serving maybe 50 people at peak you might be able to get even more.

For a system like the OP is proposing to be implemented the bandwidth available to the airplane would have to be dramatically increased. Given the investment in GoGo like technologies (which, by the way, MAX out at 3mpbs) and availability of alternative likes existing AVOD and systems like AA's streaming setup, I don't see any US carriers making the huge investment in equipment and R&D to find a way to get that kind of b/w.

So much easier to download/rip and convert using something like Format Factory to a smartphone, tablet or notebook friendly file.