The AIX team sat down with aerospace thought-leaders, market disruptors and established companies to discuss how Inflight Entertainment and Connectivity (IFEC) can keep up with changing passenger expectations.
The team spoke with Juraj Siska, Co-founder, IdeaNova Technologies.
What are your predictions for connectivity in the cabin in 2023?
“IFC availability will continue to increase due to new players entering the space and existing players increasing their capacity.”
How do you see in-flight connectivity evolving in the next five years?
“We believe that larger airlines will provide in-flight connectivity free of charge either through bundled pricing or as an airline sponsored product. Budget airlines will leverage it to generate additional revenue. The majority of airlines will listen to customer demand for connectivity with their IT initiatives.”
Some estimations have put the “take-rate” for on-board Wi-Fi at just 6%, with some lamenting the poor connection and inability to stream content.
How do you see the role of WiFi changing in the cabin going forward?
“We see that both software and hardware technologies will help to resolve this issue. Software implementations such as better compression of video streams, avoidance of redundant files, hardware solutions that leverage Wi-Fi 6 protocols and hardware/software implementations of Edge Caching will result in higher customer satisfaction.”
The demand to stream content including on short and medium flights has proliferated.
How will airlines ensure they continue to meet this demand?
“This can be improved by better content delivery of aircraft cached content, better compression technologies for both stream and cached content and improved bandwidth will help to address this demand.”
Any other comments or insight you would like to share around the topics of digitalisation and connectivity?
“We foresee a growing convergence of connectivity and entertainment, which will benefit the passenger. We think the future is in providing more accessible content on aircraft, making the airline not only the content provider, but also the enabler of content delivery from many sources, ranging from user-generated, independent and Hollywood studio providers.
Our company has been spearheading innovation in this space for the last 15 years and we are excited to unveil new products at AIX.”