

In-flight entertainment: Bring your own - smacktoward
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2014/09/flight-entertainment

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jawns
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).

~~~
edwintorok
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...

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

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vishveshs
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.

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

~~~
intev
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](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87)
[2]
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603%20600003489%20600217643&IsNodeId=1&name=4TB)

~~~
cousin_it
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.)

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

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

~~~
MiddleEndian
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).

