In-flight entertainment: Bring your own | Hacker News Reader

In-flight entertainment: Bring your own

economist.com

11 pointssmacktoward13 comments

I know this has been brought up before, but I'd like to toss in my two cents.

For HN posts that link to paywalled articles, I would like to suggest a [paywall] tag be appended to the title.

This will indicate that for someone like me, who doesn't subscribe to The Economist, I would have better luck skipping the link itself and instead going straight to the HN comments, where (hopefully) a user with access to the full text will be kind enough to post a brief summary. (Presumably, the OP should have access, and I would like to gently suggest that it should be he or she who writes the summary.)

I would also like to suggest that if you notice a post with a [paywall] tag, and someone has gone to the trouble of summarizing it, you vote that person up even if you would ordinarily not take the trouble.

Finally, I would like to suggest that these summaries self-identify not as tl;dr (too long; didn't read) but te;dr (too expensive; didn't read).

Many paywalls are unpredictable, though. In this case I was able to read the whole article and I didn't see any indication of a paywall.

Where is the paywall or has the link been changed? If I click on the link I'm able to read the article and I didn't subscribe/pay for anything...

Does incognito mode work? Not saying there shouldn't be a tag, but that way you know immediately how to access the article without having to rely on someone copying the contents into hn comments.

wish list: Oculus Rift with access to camera feed from outside the plane. talk about flying!

Enter Captain Netflix! With the cable networks improving to compete with the online content providers (hulu, hboGo, etc), Streaming in-flight could be a Business Class feature.

How feasible would it be to put a netflix cache box on each airplane? What capacity is required?

Netflix costs 3 GB/Hr for HD[1].

Considering a movie is about 2 hrs, thats 6 GB/Movie. Say they have a "limited" library of 300 movies thats 1800 GB.

Considering a short tv show is about 20 mins, thats 1GB/ Episode. Say they have the latest 1000 episodes of all the latest shows, thats 1000 GB.

Considering a long tb show is about 40 mins, thats 2Gb/Episode. Say they have the latest 1000 episodes of all the latest shows thats 2000 GB.

This brings the total to 4800 GB, rounded up to about 5 TB. If they have complete copy of everything that's 10TB. 4 TB costs about $200 [2]. If you got 3, you spend $800. Even if you triple capacity, you're only spending $1800. Obviously there are other costs involved but I think it's definitely plausible and affordable. Probably also much cheaper to negotiate with Netflix on a per seat basis rather than content distributors separately. Only disadvantage is that you wont get "currently in theaters" movies which a lot of international airlines have.

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87 [2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...

Can you stream different HD videos to 100 passengers at once from one storage device? (I don't know much about the performance of modern storage devices.)

I know at least Virgin already has an extensive on-board digital content delivery system so there's already a provider that's done a lot more than Netflix in terms of aircraft VOD infrastructure. Plus, since the airline controls the content, they get to reap the advertising rewards.

Fine with me! Will save me the hassle of disabling the TVs on the seats of most flights so I can get some sleep.

By 'disabling', I hope you just mean 'turning off'.

Yes. Or in the case of some airlines, slowly turning the brightness down until the screen doesn't render anything (until the next announcement starts and I have to do it again).

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