At the beginning of the year Continental announced that they would be fitting out their entire domestic fleet with LiveTV, the system that JetBlue uses to provide their in-flight TV service. Things are move forward rapidly at this point with the service and one lucky guy recently got to visit the LiveTV facilities in Florida and see just what the new system will offer. I’m ridiculously jealous that he got to see the new system, but happy to share some of the information he discovered.
The new system will include 80 channels, an on-screen programming guide and an 8” 16:9 ratio wide-screen monitor. So the system installed on the Continental planes will actually be better than that running on the JetBlue planes. Of course, watching the TV on Continental will cost $6 while it will remain free on JetBlue, so everything isn’t rosy in Continental-land. Still, it is nice to see things getting better for in-flight entertainment.
The system is still scheduled to go live in early 2009, with the first plane installed shortly after new years and then a couple months vetting process from the FAA before the rest of the fleet will be converted. The conversion process takes 2-3 days per plane. There are ~180 planes to be fitted out and it is possible that more than one will happen at a time, so things should be pretty much completed by the end of 2009.
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