As I am sitting here in my office, weeks after my trip to Singapore,
there are thoughts that hit me about the trip and some of the more
interesting points. One of these was the great services on
Singapore Air. They really are a spectacular airline, and one of
the technology points that I missed was something that I discovered on
the way back from Singapore.
On these flights, and many of the newer planes and flights, each seat
included its own “seat-back” TV for watching a variety of
programming. I have used this before on JetBlue flights to New
York where they offer dozens of channels of satellite TV. On the
flight over to Singapore I was reading the book Blink, and did some
catching up on magazines, and so I never did turn on the TV. I
did, from time to time, hear people snicker or laugh and glanced over
to see one of the various new movie releases playing on someone elses
TV.
On the way back from Singapore, I was tired of reading and completing
work on my laptop, and so I thought I would check out the movie
system. I first grabbed the in-flight guide and saw there were 60
different movies – besides the various TV programming that was being
offered. Out of the 60 films, at least half of them were
Hollywood flicks … some new, some older. The other half of the
movies were international movies. I turned on the TV, put on my
headset, and started to cruise through the channels. On each
movie that I came to, a small display appeared on the screen for a few
seconds that told me how far into the movie it was. I found a
movie that was only 10 minutes in, and started to watch.
As I was sitting in my seat, I accidently squashed the controller –
which pops out of the armrest – and suddenly the movie started to
fast-forward! WHAT? I was shocked. I hit pause …
and the movie paused. I hit rewind … and it quickly returned to
where I had been watching. I hit rewind again and went back all
the way to the beginning of the movie. I had no idea that each
person had complete control of the movie they were watching!
I’m not sure how this is done, and how much control is being given,
however I was impressed. I was able to pause to go to the
lavatory, and when I was done watching one show I could go to another
and simply rewind to the beginning! I could not find a way to
simply “stop” the movie and restart it from the beginning, however
rewinding worked.
What is amazing to me is that for this level of control to be given,
there must be some impressive bandwidth within the plane, and they must
count on the fact that most people would not do this. If not,
then there is even more intelligence in the system than I would have
thought. Not only would the system have to keep track of each
person and what they were watching, it would have to be able to send
the appropriate content to the appropriate person at the appropriate
time. Or the TV displays have the ability to buffer the movies?
In any case … I have to admit that I was impressed … nice system.