Perhaps you saw the Inmarsat streaming Wi-Fi demo at the last APEX conference. Sitting outside the booth was an unobtrusive laptop PC with what looked like a simple dipole antenna, and we probably would have missed it if we had our ‘Wi-Fi radar’ turned off! Upon asking we found out that a small company in Vancouver BC teamed with Inmarsat to develop the demo. Consequently, we contacted Inmarsat’s David Coiley about the ongoing testing of the future of SBTV service provision on: “Inmarsat continues to receive a hugely enthusiastic response from both airlines and aircraft operators for the concept of SBTV. It provides the ability to receive live and near live TV and video content updates via SwiftBroadband, and for that content to be distributed over Wi-Fi to passengers’ own PEDs. SBTV ticks the boxes for on-demand content, real time TV, news and sports content and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) solutions. It also segues neatly into wireless IFE strategies. It’s an easy upgrade: it is quick, affordable and it provides a lot of ‘bang for your buck’. Inmarsat is working with multiple partners and their customer airlines to implement the capability in 2013.” (Editor’s Note: SBTV is Inmarsat’s service rebranding of the LiveCast BYOD TV product.) At the Inmarsat booth we met William Mutual (CEO, LiveCast) and Jennifer Blome (VP Marketing, LiveCast) who told us of their carry-on, laptop-based demo unit. Later, we heard that their solution was tested on an A380 and delivered streamed content to devices that worked with every seat on the static test. IFExpress Readers, it works and it looks like the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomena is here to stay! In fact, the LiveCast folks call their product “BYOD TV” (TM), and for good reason. The acronym says it all – you Bring Your Own Device and they provide the TV.

If you are like us, we have been wondering how an aircraft network worth of electronics is going to provide enough bandwidth and content to stream everybody’s favorite TV or movie program to their wireless device of choice? In light of so many industry digital delusions, we asked William about their system software ability. We constructed a “Capability Hierarchy” to see how “BYOD TV” fared in performance on an aircraft. Here we go!

Question: Level 1 - Stream one common content server that is available to everybody on the plane.

Answer: “Yes we can – but with caveats. BYOD TV platform is currently enabled to provide “one to many” streaming (i.e. accept an incoming live TV feed and then multiplex the stream to allow concurrent streaming to all passengers). The impediment here is network related. In Flight bandwidth (i.e. the bits flowing from the internet to airplanes, via satellite or upward facing terrestrial network) is currently rare and expensive. However, if the business model can accommodate bandwidth cost, and with respect to existing In Flight connectivity options, there’s currently enough bandwidth available to an airplane to stream at least one TV channel live, and still maintain existing Wi-Fi services for regular internet usage. We expect delivery of the “Lowest” scenario will be much more commonplace as Ka Satellites come online during the next couple years.”

Question: Level 2- Stream multiple content from one common server available to everybody on the plane.

Answer: “Same answer as above.”

Question: Level 3 – Stream a single channel of content from the ground like news, TV or whatever via satellite to everyone on the plane.

Answer: “Fully enabled today via BYOD TV and cost effective to deliver.”

Question: Level 4 – Stream multiple channels of content from the ground like news or TV, or whatever via satellite.

Answer: “Fully enabled today via BYOD TV and cost effective to deliver.”

Question: Level 5 – Same as Level 4 but with the addition of live Internet.

Answer: “Fully enabled today, with allowance provided to the airline so they can adjust bandwidth consumption & usage ratio as they prefer.”

Question: Level 6 – Previous item but with one movie streamed from the local server at the same time.

Answer: “This scenario would likely overtax most Wi-Fi networks in the plane. Our server would have no problem streaming this amount of data, but to serve “everyone at the same time” either the Wi-Fi network and all viewing devices would need to support multicast streaming (possible, but beyond our control). More likely, this scenario will require an airplane Wi-Fi network to be upgraded to the new 802.11ac standard (aka 5G Wi-Fi). As BYOD type services catch on, we expect the WISPs will be required to upgrade their Wi-Fi to 802.11ac. We’d expect that this upgrade will likely all come in step with airplanes acquiring Ka satellite capability and its quantum increase in the size of the bandwidth connection being delivered to the plane.”

Question: Level 7 – The previous item but with many movies streamed from a local server.

Answer: “See above answer (compounded)!”

Keep in mind here that there is a challenge to get enough bandwidth for all this streaming content and, no doubt, there will be a lot of work on the new IEEE 802.11ac higher through-put wireless local area networks in the 5 GHz band.

Next week, we will talk with the Jennifer Blome at LiveCast about things like content management, DRM and a lot more LiveCast perspective on delivering content wirelessly on aircraft. Stay Tuned!