Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches

Re:Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches by filleokus on Thursday June 29, 2017 @10:25AM (#14663536)

I guess it's never going to happen, but wouldn't it be pretty cool if Netflix/HBO/Spotify provided a content mirror on the aircraft? Could probably only carry a subset of all content, but pretty cool to just open your app and get some nice Silicon Valley episodes man-in-the-middle delivered to your device of choice.

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Re:Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches by ghaff on Thursday June 29, 2017 @11:44AM (#14664165)

United and, I'm sure, other airlines have a variety of TV shows and movies that you can stream to their app on your phone and tablet over WiFi. Also note that both Netflix and Amazon allow you to download content for offline viewing these days though HBO doesn't currently AFAIK.

They have music stations as well although I've never used them as I keep a pretty large library on my phone.

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Re:Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches by duozerk on Thursday June 29, 2017 @12:28PM (#14664548)

> both Netflix and Amazon allow you to download content for offline viewing these days

In both cases sadly still with DRM; beyond the ideological stuff I'd love to be able to download a file and play it with the player I like, or to be able to reencode it. On some aspects pirate services are still better (though only if you care about that kind of things).

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Re:Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches by tyingq on Thursday June 29, 2017 @11:35AM (#14664109)

It does (sort of) exist for things that aren't on-demand, but rather more like live TV, as the 1-to-many broadcast means less satellite bandwidth used. Some airlines use this today. They should use a local server on the aircraft to cache stuff for "on demand", though I don't think any are doing this today.

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Re:Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches by xur17 on Thursday June 29, 2017 @11:48AM (#14664196)

A lot of flights have a bunch of on-demand movies and tv shows that you can watch that are stored on the plane.

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Re:Inmarsat's European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches by tyingq on Thursday June 29, 2017 @11:50AM (#14664213)

Yes...there's an older way of doing that with physical disks that someone swaps out. There's not many using a live network to trickle data onto the aircraft and store it for a small local "on demand" library.

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