When Southwest started using tablets for in-flight entertainment, I lauded it. Everybody has been baffled by just how incredibly poor most in-flight video systems are. They tend to be very slow, with poor interfaces and low resolution screens. Even today it's common to face a small widescreen that takes a widescreen film, letterboxes it and then pillarboxes it, with only an option to stretch it and make it look wrong. All this driven by a very large box in somebody's footwell.

I found out one reason why these systems are so outdated. Apparently, all seatback screens have to be safety tested, to make sure that if you are launched forward and hit your head on the screen, it is not more dangerous than it needs to be. Such testing takes time and money, so these systems are only updated every 10 years. The process of redesigning, testing and installing takes long enough that it's pretty sure the IFE system will seem like a dinosaur compared to your phone or tablet.

One airline is planning to just safety test a plastic case for the seatback into which they can insert different panels as they develop. Other airlines are moving to tablets, or providing you movies on your own tablet, though primarily they have fallen into the Apple walled garden and are doing it only for the iPad.

The natural desire is just to forget the airline system and bring your own choice of entertainment on your own tablet. This is magnified by the hugely annoying system which freezes the IFE system on every announcement. Not just the safety announcements. Not just the announcements in your language, but also the announcement that duty free shopping has begun in English, French and Chinese. While a few airlines let you start your movie right after boarding, you don't want to do it, as you will get so many interruptions until the flight levels off that it will drive you crazy. The airline provided tablet services also do this interruption, so your own tablet is better.

In the further interests of safety, new rules insist you can only use the airline's earbud headphones during takeoff and landing, not your nice noise cancellation phones. But you didn't pick up earbuds since you have the nicer ones. The theory is, your nice headphones might make you miss a safety announcement when landing, even though they tend to block background noise and actually make speech clearer.

One of the better IFE systems is the one on Emirates. This one, I am told, knows who you are, and if you pause a show on one flight, it picks up there on your next flight. (Compare that to so many systems that often forget where you were in the film on the same flight, and also don't warn you if you won't be able to finish the movie before the system is turned off.)

Using your own tablet

It turns out to be no picnic using your own tablet.

• You have to remember to pre-load the video, of course
• You have to pay for it, which is annoying if:
  • The airline is already paying for it and providing it free in the IFE
  • You have it on netflix/etc. and could watch it at home at no cost
  • You wish to start a movie one day and finish it on another flight, but don't want to pay to "own" the movie. (Because of this I mostly watch TV shows, which only have a $3 "own" price and no rental price.)

How to fix this:

1. IFE systems should know who I am, know my language, know if I have already seen the safety briefing, and not interrupt me for anything but new or plane-specific safety announcements in my chosen language.
2. Like the Emirates systems, they should know where I am in each movie, as well as my tastes.
3. How to know the language of the announcement? Well, you could have a button for the FA to push, but today software is able to figure out the language pretty reliably, so an automated system could learn the languages and the order in which they are done on that flight. Software could also spot phrases like "Safety announcement" at the start of a public address, or there could be a button.
4. Netflix should, like many other services, allow you to cache material for offline viewing. The material can have an expiration date, and the software can check when it's online to update those dates, if you are really paranoid about people using the cache as a way to watch stuff after it leaves Netflix. Reportedly Amazon does this on the Kindle Fire.
5. Online video stores (iTunes, Google Play, etc.) should offer a "plane rental" which allows you to finish a movie after the day you start it. In fact, why not have that ability for a week or two on all rentals? It would not let you restart, only let you watch material you have not yet viewed, plus perhaps a minute ahead of that.
6. Perhaps I am greedy, but it would be nice if you could do a rental that lets 2 or more people in a household watch independently, so I watch it on my flight and she watches it on hers.
7. If necessary, noise-cancelling headphones should have a "landing mode" that mixes in more outside sound, and a little airplane icon on them, so that we can keep them on during takeoff and landing. Or get rid of this pretty silly rule.

Choosing your film

There's a lot of variance in the quality of in-flight films. Air Canada seems particularly good at choosing turkeys. Before they close the doors, I look up movies -- if I can get the IFE system to work with all the announcements -- in review sites to figure out what to watch. In November, at Dublin Web Summit, I met the developers of a travel app called Quicket, which specialized in having its resources offline. I suggested they include ratings for the movies on each flight -- the airlines publish their catalog in advance -- in the offline data, and in December they had implemented it. Great job, Quicket.