In The Air

Several airlines have had per-seat in-flight entertainment systems on all seats on their long-haul planes for some time now, but I think they are missing a trick when it comes to building in some extra cool features for the captive audience which they have.

I’m able to create a custom playlist based on the (reasonably broad) range of CDs which they have on the system (although I do hope they are digital rather than physical discs!). However, I can’t save it (and given that I have a frequent flyer number, it’s not like they couldn’t uniquely identify me) for future reference. And wouldn’t it be cool if I could share it with other flyers? Including people who were on future flights?

Apparently, Virgin Atlantic now offer the ability to message other passengers — I’m not sure exactly how this works, but it certainly seems like a good start. Movies are all well and good, but with an increasingly Web 2.0-savvy audience perhaps the in-flight entertainment industry could start learning some lessons from the recent successful web applications such as Flickr and del.icio.us, or even just the iMix feature in iTunes would be a good start :-)