Short Stuff: In-Flight Entertainment

Movies on planes have changed a lot in the last couple of decades. Today, we'll go over how this stuff works. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:06Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is something that if you've been flying for a number of years has changed quite a bit.

• 1:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  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 sized monitors that dropped down from the ceiling like every 10 rows right in the middle and maybe 30% of the flight could get a good angle on that screen.

• 1:57Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07Josh Clark?

  In the middle rows.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17Josh Clark?

  Air travel episode.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Just through a tube.

• 2:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and you watched 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 um that you would find on like your at your um video store.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure. One movie, whole plane. Um, we will tell you the very first in-flight movie, believe it or not, was in 1929. Uh, it was a newsreel and a couple of cartoons on a transcontinental air transport flight.

• 2:49Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  But real deal movie service started in the early 60s. Uh, this comes from Variety and CNN and uh how stuff works. Um, but nowadays, it's a whole different deal because we have broadband connections. We have servers onboard. Everyone knows now you can stream like over a hundred movies, probably. Even a couple of decades ago, you probably just had 10 or 15 movies you could watch uh because they were just, you know, stored on a hard drive, I guess.

• 3:18Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  But now they have all kinds of movies. You can play games against passengers. You can read ebooks, listen to podcasts or music or whatever uh right there, either on the seatback screen or on your laptop or tablet or whatever.

• 3:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, um, it is quite a time to be alive for that. But the the the, 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? It's still around in different forms.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, it cost them a ton of money. Uh, apparently, some airlines spend like $20 million per year just on like licensing the content. Uh, then you 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.

• 4:17Josh Clark?

  Right. Which, I mean, they're like, well, so what? We make so much more than that.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they'd pass along the savings to us, I'm sure.

• 4:26Josh Clark?

  For sure. 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.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, to license.

• 4:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for a license. And then other licenses are like by a per view. 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.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:12Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  I will do that on airplanes almost 100% of the time. I won't watch either that or like an old favorite. But I watched F1, the Brad Pitt Formula One movie on this last flight recently. And it was okay. It was an airplane movie.

• 5:28Josh Clark?

  Too much minimalist, like, office stuff for me.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 5:34Josh Clark?

  I mean, it was lousy with that. I saw some, I was watching it over somebody's shoulder.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of that. I mean, the racing stuff was really, really great. I'm sure, obviously, much better on a big screen. 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, pretty bad.

• 6:06Josh Clark?

  Like inception?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  In that respect. Yeah, like inception.

• 6:10Josh Clark?

  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.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 6:37Josh Clark?

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• 6:46Speaker 02

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• 6:59Josh Clark?

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• 7:15Speaker 02

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• 7:42Josh Clark?

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• 8:11Josh Clark?

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• 8:51Josh Clark?

  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.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:00Josh Clark?

  And they come in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes the airlines like commission companies to edit the movies that they're gonna 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 Austin Powers movies because of all the mean stuff about different cultures. 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.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. It's kind of funny. Some of the things they'll edit out. Apparently, they'll edit out other airline logos, which I didn't know, which is hysterical. Not so hysterical. You're never gonna see a movie about a terrorist, or certainly like a hijacking, or a plane crash, or anything. You're not gonna see that Denzel Washington movie. Like, you're not gonna see anything like that, which makes a lot of sense, of course.

• 10:07Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  But depending on where you are in the world, too, there's different cultures that are gonna find different things offensive, and you gotta be aware of that. So like, in Europe, they're way more okay 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.

• 10:35Josh Clark?

  Right. Airlines that carry a lot of Muslim passengers will frequently have like any references to pig or pork or anything like that edited out.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:45Josh Clark?

  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.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  I don't think that's the case.

• 10:56Josh Clark?

  And in 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.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, through headphones and also they have the little sort of caveat now where you have, they tell you beforehand, this contains scenes of, you know, violence or whatever, brief nudity, and you have to tell whether or not you want to proceed.

• 11:24Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Uh, beforehand and you know, this, I think, cause I was, 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, but there are, um, there's an actual trade group, the Airline Passenger Experience Association. Because there are no laws about this, they, they will offer guidance, I guess, to movie distributors and to airlines and stuff like that. Um, there've been some sort of, um, I don't know about famous, but like at least gone viral online for like, how could they

• 12:08Speaker 02

  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. Um, and so Delta was like, hey, that's not us. We like, that's the movie they gave us.

• 12:25Josh Clark?

  But apparently there is a guy who runs a company that HowStuffWorks talked to, Amir Samnani. He's Vice President for, of Content Services for Global Eagle, which is like the big, the big company that edits films for airlines.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:40Josh Clark?

  He had said, and he wasn't saying this to, 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 all like, they're like Singapore. They're like, bring it on.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, there was, in 2007, there was a cosponsored 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.

• 13:26Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Without their parents.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  I was looking at this and there was congresspeople, congressmen from North Carolina, and it does especially today, sound just preposterous. But to, 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.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Well, that makes sense, a little more sense.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Right, it did. It did to me too. And I was reading like a, 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.

• 14:06Josh Clark?

  That was a quote from it. So they landed on if this did happen to just show PG 13 as a compromise.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, all right. Well, that makes sense.

• 14:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Uh, 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.

• 14:25Josh Clark?

  They had funding.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  That's right, which will be flying soon when we do our Canadian tour. We got some Air Canada flights booked. Can't wait.

• 14:31Josh Clark?

  You got that straight.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  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 like, that just sort of tells you how many movies are being edited down for content. 21% were longer, which is sort of interesting.

• 14:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I would guess Virgin is not huge on editing down movies, but you never know.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  You never know.

• 15:01Josh Clark?

  So, yeah. Chuck said, you never know. I guess Chuck, doesn't that mean that short stuff is out?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 15:10Speaker 03

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