Watching movies and TV on Southwest Airlines is getting a little easier. The carrier’s inflight entertainment portal, powered by Global Eagle‘s Airtime platform, no longer requires a dedicated mobile application for consumers to stream content on board. The DRM-protected content can instead be consumed in the web browser of the devices.
At Global Eagle, we are passionate about providing airlines and their customers with seamless access to inflight entertainment. This release enhances the customer experience, helping to drive engagement and consumption of onboard content and connectivity.
– Per Norén, President, Global Eagle
While some of the content on Southwest’s streaming entertainment platform was always available via the browser other selections only played via the dedicated app. This requirement, dictated by digital rights management licensing, protected the content owners but left users in a less than ideal position, especially for Hollywood TV and movie releases.
A shift to the latest media encryption standard, Common Media Application Format (CMAF), allows Global Eagle to reduce encoding requirements so that multiple DRM technologies can be used on a single video file. Moreover, the DRM encoded into the CMAF-packaged files can be decrypted in most modern browsers on common device platforms, including MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows.
Global Eagle and Southwest also took this opportunity to update the interface for the entertainment content. Passengers will now see Cinemagraphs with an animated movie poster when browsing the content selections on their devices.
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