In terms of intent; Virgin Atlantic's inflight entertainment system is quite amazing: on demand music, video and games - including playing games against other passengers on the plane. But after seeing a number of failures on both of my flights so far, I am convinced that the design is flawed.
Basically, the inflight entertainment system uses a very thin (anorexiac?) client which seems to process input and provide output only and one server (well atleast one per class anyway ... can't confirm about business class). Because the thin client performs no operations - the server does tend to become overloaded - and rebooting it; requires an inactivity period of over 30 minutes for most users. Furthermore, if too many users are using a certain feature - like the mapping service - then the system also becomes overloaded or too slow. In fact, there are a number of instances where the system (from the user's perspective) is just too slow or unresponsive.
In my opinion, it would be a better design in incorporate much of the interface processing components, like the menus on the client side. This way - the server does not have to do everything and the response time would be increased. Furthermore, if there are problems with one or two clients; it will not require the entire system to be rebooted. Just a few thoughts ... anyone else used a similar system?
2 comments:
The only other one I can think of offhand is SAA's entertainment system on their newer planes, which is on-demand based. That seemed to work fine, although I confess I wasn't really scrutinising it all that hard ;-)
Al, for your next international trip (so what, in a month or 2? :-P) you should fly SAA & give us the low-down shizzle's nizzle on how it compares to Virgin!
I did fly SAA the first time I came to the US .. the entertainment system failed on both directions. So, can't say more about it. What I do remember from my Zurich flight though - it wasn't true on demand; and was very similar to the BA system. They had a lot of "channels" which cycled through movies, audio etc. But it did work ...
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