IFE C ONTENT D ELI V ERY
‘crunched’ from more than 10 million rows of data over
5,000 lines of code.
“For an airline to get meaningful insights on passenger
engagement, we need to help them solve these challenges
around the data sets,” Spafax’s global VP of technical
sales, Kevin Birchmore, said during an APEX Expo panel
on data analytics in September 2019. He explained that
data is pulled from across their various IFE systems,
integrated with CSP data like licencing fees, and then
integrated with third-party data. The data must be
updated regularly, and filtered at the lowest level
(i.e., category, route and cabin).
“The insights are being used to make both
tactical monthly decisions on content selection and
longer term strategic decisions,” Birchmore told
Aircraft Interiors International. “The dashboards
include movie details, TV details (either the
series or the episode), movie category, and TV
category, giving both detailed analyses for
individual titles and summary level trends.”
Of course, everything about the passenger
experience today seems to involve data. When
airlines consider inflight entertainment, inflight
advertising and inflight e-commerce, there are
three kinds of data that are relevant to them all:
personal, behavioural and environmental. Today’s
IFE systems enable airlines to engage with passengers
with both location and immediacy.
And the same data that drives content
recommendation and discovery engines also drives
inflight advertising and ecommerce. For example, systems
like Panasonic Avionics’ cloud-based ‘Insights’ system
that was rolled out in February 2019 captures data from
a range of sources.
“Airlines today have access to more data points than
ever before,” David Bartlett, CTO of Panasonic Avionics
told attendees at the APEX Expo panel. “By fully
integrating data analytics across every aspect of the
passenger experience, airlines will be able to optimise
their passenger experience.
“Insights harvests onboard and third-party data from
a wide range of touchpoints including IFE, connectivity,
social media, location and weather monitors. It analyses
this data in real-time to provide airlines with actionable
insights, enabling them to create a two-way loop between
them and their passengers,” stated Bartlett.
Touch Inflight Solutions has developed a data
analytics tool focused on IFE called ‘Touch Analytics’,
which is an automated web and app-based platform. For
clients like TAP Air Portugal, Touch uses data captured
via Panasonic’s system, but Touch Analytics can be
connected to any airline system usage data, with any
frequency of update, to evaluate engagement quality
by measuring actual content play-time and bounce-rate.
According to André Valera, Touch’s director of business
aircraftinteriorsinternational.com
110 MARCH 2020
“Airlines today have
access to more data points
than ever before. By fully
integrating data analytics across
every aspect of the passenger
experience, airlines will be able
to optimise their passenger
“ Airlines today have access
to more data points than
ever before”
development, Touch drills down usage data analysis by
flight, customer or demographic profile and content type.
This data is also correlated with other surveys, Net
Promoter Score (NPS) and other KPIs into a single
dynamic platform, according to Valera. Touch Analytics
is also used by Nepal Airlines, Air Europa, Azul and GOL.
Touch’s platform has helped TAP Air Portugal to
invest in branded destination content such as Riding
Portugal, which has a more than 90% play-through rate,
according to Miguel Ferreira, IFEC manager for the
airline, who confirmed that TAP Air Portugal has also
been able to increase the airline’s NPS with Touch’s data
analytics. Ferreira said that it is important to know
passengers’ reactions to movies not in terms of the
number of clicks, but in terms of engagement.
Spafax also believes that NPS can be impacted with
analytics. “With one of our key client airlines,” said
experience”
David Bartlett, CTO of
Panasonic Avionics
/aircraftinteriorsinternational.com