In short
Stuff You Should Know: Short Stuff - In-Flight Entertainment
Episode Overview In this episode, hosts Josh and Chuck delve into the evolution of in-flight entertainment, particularly focusing on how movies shown on airplanes have changed over the decades. The discussion covers the transition from communal viewing to on-demand services and the complexities airlines face in curating content for diverse passengers.
Key Discussions
Historical Context of In-Flight Movies
- Early Days:
- The first in-flight movie was a newsreel plus cartoons in 1929.
- The 1960s marked the beginning of actual movie service during flights.
- Traditional In-Flight Experience:
- Passengers used to watch a single movie shown on large monitors, with limited viewing angles.
- Headphone technology was basic, contributing to a less immersive experience.
Transition to Modern In-Flight Entertainment
- Technological Advancements:
- Current systems allow streaming of over 100 movies, games, e-books, and music.
- Individual screens in seatbacks provide personalized viewing experiences.
- Cost Implications:
- Airlines spend around $20 million annually on licensing content.
- Each equipped plane can incur up to $5 million in setup costs.
Airline Content Curation
- Licensing Costs:
- Specific films can cost airlines around $90,000 for a few months of showing.
- Licenses vary based on the content and its popularity.
- Content Editing for Sensitivity:
- Airlines often commission edits to remove inappropriate content.
- Differences in cultural sensitivities impact what content is edited out. For example:
- Western countries: More tolerance for nudity, less for violence.
- Middle Eastern airlines: Remove references to pork but may allow more violence.
- Singapore: Sensitive to LGBTQ+ content.
- Customization of Edits:
- Some airlines manage their own edits, while others rely on studios.
- Examples of controversial edits include the removal of same-sex kisses from films, leading to backlash.
Current Trends and Regulations
- Regulatory Proposals:
- In 2007, a proposal for child-safe viewing areas on flights was introduced but never passed due to practical challenges.
- Editing Practices:
- A study found that about two-thirds of movies maintain their original length, while some are edited shorter or longer depending on the airline's policies.
Personal Experiences with In-Flight Movies
- The hosts share anecdotes about the types of movies they watch on flights, often opting for films they wouldn't normally choose but find entertaining in the context of air travel.
Conclusion This episode highlights the significant evolution of in-flight entertainment, from a single movie for the whole plane to diverse, on-demand content tailored to different cultural sensitivities. Air travel now offers a much richer entertainment experience, though it comes with logistical and financial challenges for airlines.
Key Takeaways
- In-flight movies have drastically changed from collective watching to personalized streaming.
- Airlines incur substantial costs for licensing and editing content to cater to diverse passenger backgrounds.
- The sensitivity of content varies significantly across different regions and cultures.
- Personal experiences during flights often lead to watching movies that may not typically be chosen in other settings.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOHistory of In-Flight Movies
1:18 to 2:15
Explore the evolution of in-flight movies from single screens to personal entertainment.
“And this is something that if you've been flying for a number of years has changed quite a bit.”
Modern In-Flight Entertainment Systems
2:15 to 3:28
Understand how modern aircraft offer extensive entertainment options to passengers.
“You plugged in your headphones that were like hydraulics, if I remember correctly.”
Costs of Licensing Movie Content
3:28 to 4:25
Learn about the financial implications for airlines in providing movie content.
“It is quite a time to be alive for that.”
Airline Movies and Content Editing
4:25 to 6:15
Discover how airlines edit movies for in-flight viewing and the reasons behind it.
“Yeah, but they'd pass along those savings to us, I'm sure.”
Cultural Sensitivity in Movie Selection
8:07 to 11:21
Understand how airlines consider cultural sensitivities when selecting movies.
“All right, so you were saying airplane movies are ones that you would normally never pay to see.”
Legislative Attempts at Content Control
11:21 to 13:52
Explore past legislative efforts to control in-flight movie content for children.
“just totally clueless that, like, kids are around or other people that might be offended.”
In-Flight Movie Lengths and Trends
14:04 to 14:38
Learn about the editing trends of in-flight movies compared to theater versions.
“That's right, which will be flying soon when we do our Canadian tour.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Josh Clark:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:08Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave, and this is short stuff about in-flight movies, all the great stuff that you can watch when you fly with your favorite airline.
1:22Josh Clark:Yeah. And this is something that if you've been flying for a number of years has changed quite a bit.
1:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
1:28Josh Clark:I do remember the old days where I didn't fly a lot growing up at all. Like I think I flew one time before I went to college and then not even a lot after that because I was always broke. But I did go on a couple of flights back in the day where they had the one movie being shown for the entire plane. And there were these big, huge, like Volkswagen Beetle size monitors that dropped down from the ceiling, like every 10 rows right in the middle. And maybe 30 percent of the flight could get a good angle on that screen.
2:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And if you were lucky, you were close to that one big screen version that was like broadcast or shown on like the wall.
2:08Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, yeah.
2:09Chuck Bryant:In the middle rows. Yeah, that was how we used to watch movies. Everyone watched the same movie at the same time. You plugged in your headphones that were like hydraulics, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah. Air travel episode.
2:21Josh Clark:Just through a tube.
2:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And you watch that same movie. And because there's all sorts of different people with all sorts of different tastes, the movie you saw was radically different from the movie that you would find on like your video store.
2:37Josh Clark:Yes, for sure. One movie, whole plane. We will tell you the very first in-flight movie, believe it or not, was in 1929. It was a newsreel and a couple of cartoons on a transcontinental air transport flight. But real deal movie service started in the early 60s. This comes from Variety and CNN and HowStuffWorks. But nowadays, it's a whole different deal because we have broadband connections. We have servers on board. Everyone knows now you can stream like over 100 movies probably. Even a couple of decades ago, you probably just had 10 or 15 movies you could watch because they were just, you know, stored on a hard drive, I guess.
3:21Josh Clark:Right. But now they have all kinds of movies. You can play games against passengers. You can read e-books, listen to podcasts or music or whatever. Right there, either on the seat back screen or on your laptop or tablet or whatever. Yeah.
3:34Chuck Bryant:It is quite a time to be alive for that. But I guess the whole problem, the whole issue that faced airlines back in the day, which was how can you show a movie to a bunch of different people, is still around in different forms.
3:49Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I mean, it costs them a ton of money. Apparently, some airlines spend like$20 million per year just on licensing the content. Then you've got to outfit the planes. That can cost about$5 million per aircraft. And it makes it a lot heavier. So there was a guy, an econ professor in Norway, that basically calculated all the weight and everything and said, if airlines got rid of this stuff, they can save about$3 million per year per aircraft by not having this on board.
4:19Chuck Bryant:Right. Which, I mean, they're like, well, so what? We make so much more than that.
4:25Josh Clark:Yeah, but they'd pass along those savings to us, I'm sure. For sure.
4:29Chuck Bryant:Yeah, of course. Apparently, depending on where you are, I think in the United States, you pay something like 90 grand for one movie for a couple of months. Yeah, for license. And then other licenses are like by a purview. So every time somebody watches a movie, you have to pay a certain amount, probably not 90 grand. But still, like there's all sorts of different ways that airlines have to kind of dig in their pockets to make sure you have all the movies you want. So feel bad for the airlines.
5:01Josh Clark:Yeah. I don't know if this is for everybody, but I even call them airplane movies. It's sort of like a hotel movie. It's a movie that I probably wouldn't pay for or go see in a theater, but I will totally get like had enough interest to watch it. Right. I will do that on airplanes almost 100 percent of the time. I won't watch either that or like an old favorite. But I watched F1. Oh, yeah. Brad Pitt Formula One movie on this last flight recently. And it was OK. It was an airplane movie.
5:30Chuck Bryant:too much minimalist like um office stuff for me oh yeah yeah i mean it was lousy with that i saw some i was watching it over somebody's shoulder yeah yeah there was a lot of that i mean the
5:42Josh Clark:racing stuff was really really great um i'm sure obviously much better on a big screen uh but it was one of those where like not most but a lot of people don't understand formula one racing so the entire time like the race commentary was so explanatory like and now he has to go do this because that means this because the rules say this and it's just incessant and it helped you understand it but it was really pretty uh pretty bad like inception in that respect yeah
6:11Chuck Bryant:like inception uh let's take a little break and we'll come back and we'll talk about some of the stuff that airlines have to do to make sure that no one gets offended by their movies all right
6:20Josh Clark:we'll be right back
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8:29Chuck Bryant:All right, so you were saying airplane movies are ones that you would normally never pay to see. I get that. There's also airline versions of movies.
8:38Josh Clark:Yeah.
8:39Chuck Bryant:And they come in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes the airlines like commission companies to edit the movies that they're going to show. Other times the studios themselves will make an airline cut where they edit out, you know, the the sexiest stuff or the most violent or gory stuff or like jokes. like you probably couldn't show any of the um austin powers movies because of all the mean stuff about different cultures um they figure out how to edit that out in the best way possible so that it doesn't screw up the the plot which is was not what they were doing before when they showed the same movie to everybody at the same time it was just really clumsy editing then yeah
9:21Josh Clark:for sure uh it's kind of funny some of the things i'll edit out um apparently they'll edit out other airline logos, which I didn't know, which is hysterical. Not so hysterical. You're never going to see a movie about a terrorist or certainly like a hijacking or a plane crash or anything. You're not going to see that Denzel Washington movie. Like you're not going to see anything like that, which makes a lot of sense, of course. Sure. But depending on where you are in the world, too, there's different cultures that are going to find different things offensive. And you've got to be aware of that.
9:54Josh Clark:So like in Europe, they're way more OK with like a little bit of nudity, maybe a little bit more sexy stuff. But they're not as much as into the gore and violence. The Middle East, apparently any kind of bearskin or sexy stuff you can't have. But they have a little higher tolerance for violent scenes on their flights. Right.
10:15Chuck Bryant:Airlines that carry a lot of Muslim passengers will frequently have like any references to pig or pork or anything like that edited out.
10:23Josh Clark:Yeah.
10:24Chuck Bryant:Singapore apparently is sensitive to scenes or movies with LGBTQ plus content, which means they can't get enough of it is what I'm reading. I don't think that's the case. And language, you would think like, well, they got to edit that out. But that's not the case anymore. It doesn't seem to have been the case ever since they started showing on-demand, individually selected movies, because you listen to them through headphones generally.
Read the full transcript
10:50Josh Clark:Yeah, through headphones. And also they have the little sort of caveat now where they tell you beforehand this contains scenes of violence or whatever, brief nudity. And you have to tell whether or not you want to proceed beforehand. And, you know, I think because I'm still a bit of a prude. I was raised Baptist, so I'm always very sensitive to other people's experience around me. Like, I would never be the guy that's just watching some awful, like, thing on their screen with people all around them, just totally clueless that, like, kids are around or other people that might be offended. So I've always been sensitive to that.
11:27Josh Clark:But there are – there's an actual trade group, the Airline Passenger Experience Association. Because there are no laws about this, they will offer guidance, I guess, to movie distributors and to airlines. and stuff like that. There have been some sort of, I don't know about famous, but like at least gone viral online for like how could they edit that out. I know when the film Carol came out in 2015, which is about a lesbian couple in the 1950s, Delta got a lot of guff because they edited out scenes of like women kissing. And so Delta was like, hey, that's not us. We like, that's the movie they gave us.
12:03Chuck Bryant:But apparently there is a guy who runs a company that HowStuffWorks talked to, Amir Samnani, he's vice president of content services for Global Eagle, which is like the big company that edits films for airlines. He had said, he wasn't saying this to contradict Delta, but he said like airlines actually have a lot of say in what gets edited out. So it seems like Delta was like, no, we can't show lesbian stuff, whereas American Airlines and United are like, they're like Singapore. They're like, bring it on. Right.
12:39Josh Clark:Yeah, there was, in 2007, there was a co-sponsored bill called the Family Friendly Flies Act, where they wanted to have child-safe viewing areas on the planes where anything over G couldn't be played. But I think it never passed. And I'm sure it didn't pass because that's a near impossibility or just a terrible idea to be like, we'll put all the kids in the back of the plane together without their parents.
13:07Chuck Bryant:I was looking at this and there was congresspeople, congressmen from North Carolina. And it does, especially today, sound just preposterous. But in their defense, this was 2007. And this was a time when planes still mostly showed the same movie to the entire airplane at the same time.
13:26Josh Clark:Well, that makes sense. A little more sense.
13:28Chuck Bryant:Right. It did. It did to me, too. And I was reading like just basically an article on it from the time. And they were like, well, one of the problems is like you don't want to just show only G-rated movies because everybody on the airplane is going to hate kids even more than they already do. That was a quote from it. So they landed on if this did happen to just show PG-13 as a compromise.
13:52Josh Clark:Yeah. All right. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and if you're wondering how much gets edited out, someone actually did check running times of movies shown on Virgin Air and Air Canada. They had funding. That's right, which will be flying soon when we do our Canadian tour. We got some Air Canada flights book. Can't wait. You got that straight. And they found that two-thirds of the movies shown on these two airlines were the same length as the theater presentation. 14 % were shorter. Not 14 % shorter, but 14 % of the movies overall. So that just sort of tells you how many movies are being edited down for content.
14:30Josh Clark:21 % were longer, which is sort of interesting.
14:32Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I would guess Virgin is not huge on editing down movies, but you never know.
14:38Josh Clark:You never know.
14:40Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, Chuck said you never know. I guess, Chuck, doesn't that mean that short stuff is out?
14:45Josh Clark:Indeed.
14:49Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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