Emirates Ice

MEDIA | Ahmad Humeid checks out Emirates Airways ‘ice’ in-flight entertainment system

If you think personal video monitors with a few channels to choose from in economy class is cool, you have seen nothing yet. On a recent flight from Dubai to Amman my family and I experienced the future of TV in mid air. And it is quite amazing.

I suspected that something is different the minute I stepped on the Emirates flight. The personal video screens, which are standard on this airline’s planes, where showing a start screen that I have not seen before, branded with the word ‘ice’, which stands for information, communication and entertainment. With a few clicks on the screen and a glance at the entertainment booklet, a world of on demand video, audio and communication was revealed to me.

The ‘ice’ system is mind blowing. Hundreds of movies, dozens of audio channels, downward and front camera views, tens of video games and even sms and email communication are available on every seat! This is a true ‘on-demand’ system. Any movie from the huge selection, can be called up, played from any point, stopped and fast-forwarded and rewound. The selection of movies includes a large variety of current box office hits, classic and children movies, browsable by genre. Every movie’s trailer can be watched and a synopsis can be read on the screen.

One of highlights of the audio programming is a collection of all UK No.1 hit singles ever! This is only a small part of around 6000 music audio tracks available covering multiple languages, topic and music genres.

Having this huge amount of audiovisual content at one’s fingertips redefines the TV experience. As every member of our family (two adults and two kids) had his or her own monitor, we found ourselves watching different things. I watched the latest Wallace and Gromit flick (highly recommended by the way) and was able to catch the first 15 minutes of The Man (With Samuel Jackson and Eugene Levy), which I missed when I watched the movie on the flight to Dubai on a non-ice equipped Emirates flight. I then listened to a radio show about Dubai for the remaining time of the flight, while following the path of the plane on the onscreen flight map. My wife watched Mr and Mrs Smith and the kids watched Sky High and The Incredibles. Not bad for a family afternoon in the air!

For those with obsessive communication habits, the system offers email access and sms sending and reception capabilities (no web browsing yet). The cost of access is 10 dollars for 60 minutes. Not bad if you really need to send that all important email to someone down there.

What is happening at 30,000 feet is a glimpse of the future of TV and digital entertainment. A central media and communication server streams the content on demand to users of the system, enabling this liberating and personalized media experience. Having something like this available on my laptop or TV at home would be cool. Already we are using our PCs as hubs for digital content and there have been a number of attempts to integrate the PC’s and TV’s media experiences. But providing an on-demand, instantaneous-response media experience at home is an entirely different infrastructural challenge, when you consider the kind of bandwidth needed from the central server to every home.

Emirates’ ice system has won the 2005 Inflight Entertainment Award conducted by Skytrax, an airline ranking service, with Singapore Airlines’ KrisWorld and Virgin Atlantic’s Vport coming in 2nd and 3rd place. That’s no small feat in today’s competitive airline industry.

Hotels and closed neighbourhood-based services are obvious markets for on-demand media technologies. In countries with high bandwidth availability like Korea and Japan, consumers are already well into the on-demand multimedia age. But for the rest of us we still need to take a flight to experience the future.

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Comments

5 responses to “The future of TV, as experienced on a plane!”

  1. jameed Avatar
    jameed

    Impressive!
    On the other hand, on a recent flight from Denver to Salt Lake City, which is around 2 hours if not less, I was told I have to pay five dollars to turn on the monitor then I have the option of watching an old History Channel documentary or a movie which may be longer than the flight itself.
    Internal flights in the US are largely like “sarvees al abdali”: It gets you there, however it is not entirely reliable or the most comfortable ride…oh and you are tuck listening to whatever the driver is listening to.

  2. oranginaaa Avatar
    oranginaaa

    what do u think I do when I fly 18 hours!
    u should see the ceiling, it shows a sky with stars and the light inside changes to match the outside, so you could sleep!

  3. sabri Avatar
    sabri

    this is all great, but reminds me of a book i read, paradox of choice!

  4. Issam Avatar
    Issam

    Well may be RJ should install the ICE system on board their crafts!

  5. rubhia Avatar
    rubhia

    well this really is a complaint beacause why do you do your prices of the tickets so expensive if you do them for atleast like for let say £450.00 or if that is tocheap than the highist £550.00 between that amount.

    thank you for reading this message.