Safran Passenger Innovations has unveiled plans to to enable passengers to seamlessly connect their personal electronic devices to its RAVE in-flight entertainment (IFE) system.
The company is demonstrating the capability during AIX in Hamburg and, speaking at an 8 April press briefing, Safran Passenger Innovations senior vice-president, global sales and marketing Jared Siqueland, said: “It’s time to redefine in-flight entertainment. It’s been the same content for a very long time – you can’t really watch what you want, you can’t see the content you want to see.”
Safran Passenger Innovations’ vice-president products and strategy Ben Asmar says: “We’re going to let RAVE IFE, for the first time, allow passengers to cast their own content from their personal electronic devices right to the IFE screen in front of them.
“By doing this, we’re going to create a connected, passenger curated experience. They can bring the content they want to watch when they want to watch it on a fantastic 4K high-definition screen in front of them.
“As we get more involved in streaming services on board, more involved with different types of content coming on to the aircraft, our system will support it and will allow our passengers to watch it in the most comfortable way possible,” Asmar says.
The company is also showcasing its Edge Cache technology during the show, which will allow for the integration of hundreds of terabytes of cache space without the need for any additional equipment.
“To support this, we need to be able to cache content on board the aircraft<” says Asmar. “So we’re announcing that the RAVE system will be able to do edge caching, which means if we can get the content that is coming on through the internet, we cache it on board on our existing equipment, no additional hardware is required.
“We’re using our RAVE cloud services which use all the infrastructure already on board the aircraft to store this content. And we can work with the streaming providers to cache the content on board the aircraft so you’re not consuming lots and lots of bandwidth. You download it one time and then everyone on board the aircraft who wants to watch that can enjoy it without using internet bandwidth.”
Siqueland also highlights advances in the company’s product “accessibility for IFE”, which was a Crystal Cabin Award finalist last year. “This is the accessibility mode within the Rave IFE system, targeting everyone to be able to be included in the IFE environment,” he says. ”New this year is that there is now a link to be able to get all of the design templates. All of the design principles will be publicly available.”
