Behind the airline industry’s entertainment arms race

Excited to finally watch Barbie on your cross-country flight home for the holidays? Airlines are betting on it.

The global airline industry currently spends ~$500 million per year on movies, TV shows, live TV, podcasts, and music, per a new report from the WSJ – and that number is only expected to go up.

• United Airlines is in the process of outfitting all of its planes with seat-back screens.
• Delta already has seat-back screens on most of its planes, just like JetBlue, which built a business around screens at every seat when it began flying in 2000.
• Southwest has no screens, and American only has them on long-haul flights; though both still offer entertainment options tied to travelers’ own devices.

These in-flight entertainment investments are meant to boost ticket sales. To quote United CEO Scott Kirby: “[screens will make passengers] pick United more, and more often.”

But the process isn’t as simple as just adding screens and then you’re good to go – the content that makes it onto these screens is also important. Delta, for example, relies on a team of six people to choose its content, then relies on technicians to board each plane in the company’s fleet every 30 days (when the content library gets refreshed) to reinstall devices preloaded with new content.

👀 Looking ahead… The global in-flight entertainment and connectivity market was $5.96 billion last year, and is projected to reach $11.79 billion in 2030.