THE F UTUR E O F I FEC
“Today, 75% of Netflix viewing
activity is the direct result of
content recommendations that
rely on data analytics”
Andre Valera, Touch Inflight
and distribution services, The Americas, for IATA, told
the APEX Tech conference in May that “NDC is about
giving travel agents the same capabilities as airline
websites.” She said there are currently 67 NDC-certified
airlines representing 60% of IATA membership.
2hr 40
Average IFE
engagement time
per flight
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066 SEPTEMBER 2019
ABOUT
migration from wired to wireless IFE –
have taken years to accomplish. And IFE
systems were engineered on a two-year
development and a 10 to 13-year
deployment cycle, largely because of
the amount of time needed to
THE AUTHOR
The paradigm shifts in IFE in the past –
the migration from communal screens to
personal screens, the migration from
linear content to on-demand, and the
Michael Childers is chief consultant, content
and media strategy, for Lufthansa Systems. He
has been a member of the APEX board of directors
for six years, and chairs its Technology Committee.
In 2013 he was awarded the APEX Outstanding
Contribution Award for leadership in digital
technology. He was a member of the FAA PED
Aviation Rulemaking Committee and the US
Department of Transportation’s ACCESS
Advisory Committee.
The future of IFEC will be in digital
platforms that host IFE, connectivity,
e-commerce, and a range of applications
that will increase passenger engagement,
and make the journey more pleasant.
Jan-Peter Gänse, head of
passenger experience solutions
for Lufthansa Systems, calls
this concept ‘the aircraft as
a data centre’ saying, “For
a seamless, door-to-door
digital experience, airlines
need to close the gap in the
aircraft. An open IT
platform helps airlines to do
this. IFE is no longer its own
ecosystem, but part of the larger digital
ecosystem of an airline.”
But data in the travel industry has
been kept in silos. Jeffrey Goh, CEO of
Star Alliance, said at a recent APEX Tech
conference that “data not being
transferred from one airline to another is
the source of most travel problems.”
One of the larger initiatives aimed at
breaking down these silos is IATA’s New
Distribution Capability (NDC), an XMLbased
data interchange program. IATA’s
Alicia Lines, regional director of financial
…which equals
30% - 40% of
average flight
duration
amortise the capital
investment.
But the shift from
hardware-based to
software-based IFE
not only potentially
decreases costs, but
also speeds up the deployment cycle.
The need to personalise the IFEC
experience, to become more data-led,
to move into the cloud, and to share
data on a cross-industry basis are all
occurring simultaneously, and to a large
extent, are inter-dependent. Similarly,
GROWTH IN
EXPERIENTIAL
TRAVEL
At the recent APEX Asia Conference in Shanghai,
FlightPath3D’s vice president of marketing,
Jon Norris, outlined three big trends shaping
passenger needs – and the IFE industry. “First
of all, there is the growth in ‘experiential travel’.
This comes as the world’s leading visual social
network, Instagram, has passed one billion users
and posts on social networks now influence many
decisions on where to go… Secondly, big data and
AI are driving personalisation… And finally there
is the growth in ancillary revenue, from US$2.5
billion to US$67 billion in a decade,” says Norris.
“There is an opportunity to create a paradigm
shift in the inflight experience using data that
can dynamically re-organise IFE content to create
more targeted products and travel suggestions
for passengers,” says Duncan Jackson, president
of FlightPath3D.
initiatives by the APEX Technology
Committee to make IFE part of larger
media and entertainment delivery
ecosystems, and the growing role of
consumer electronics in IFE, will serve to
speed up the deployment cycle of IFEC
systems and make them more similar to
consumer product trends.
The next five years will likely see more
changes in IFEC than any other period in
the history of the industry.
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