United Airlines is making over 100 channels of live DIRECTV available free of charge from gate-gate, effective immediately.
211 Boeing 737s in the United fleet are equipped with seat-back live television, totaling more than 30,000 seats. All live channels of DIRECTV are now complimentary.
The move is part of a larger customer service push by United to make flights more bearable. With the combination of seatback TV on many flights and streaming audio and video plus Wi-Fi internet across the mainline fleet, United will certainly help passengers pass the time.
United’s Chief Customer Officer Toby Enqvist stated:
This year, we will be introducing a series of innovations and improvements designed to help build a great experience for all our customers. Offering free entertainment, whether it’s on seat back TV or on personal devices, is one example of how we are placing our customers at the heart of what we do and helping them to relax and enjoy their flights.
Corporate babble aside, my own observations are as follows:
- Passengers love in-flight-entertainment to pass the time
- Few passengers seemed willing to pay for DIRECTV
- Making DIRECTV free and keeping streaming movies/TV free will make passengers more tolerant of tighter seat pitch and more uncomfortable slimline seats
There is certainly ancillary revenue loss when United will not longer be able to collect $5-10 for each passenger wiling to pay for DIRECTV. But United is also likely saving money in that it won’t have to pay for movies on these seatback devices anymore (that’s just a guess).
CONCLUSION
This is certainly a customer-friendly move that will make many passengers happy.
How about you? Will free DIRECTV make you more loyal to United?
And meanwhile AA is actively retrofitting new 737s to remove seatback entertainment. I realize that the vast majority of passengers now travel with at least 1 screen but I commend United for making this effort. I’d much rather watch a larger screen at eye level than an iphone or iPad. Moreover, it is nice to not have to plan ahead to have downloaded contect.
Agreed, this is a good move by United that won’t really cost them anything. I find those flickering screens to be so annoying, they are old and low-resolution. I look forward to the day they are gone from the fleet. But until then, giving them a bit of use at the end of their useful life is a great way to marginally boost the passenger experience. Let’s hope a passenger isn’t seated next to a fat person who blocks the screen!
AA now lets you stream Apple Music (if you have an Apple account) on in-flight WiFi. Honestly, I can just download my music to my phone with Spotify and not pay for the WiFi. TV is a great way to pass time because it is always something new, unlike traditional movies and tv series. Very frequent flyers usually get bored of the catalog of movies/tv series.
I’d prefer to stream from my iPad. I cannot stand back of the seat TVs.
Having flown an equal amount of flights with & without seat-back IFE on several airlines over the past few years including: Aer Lingus (with, long-haul flights; none short-haul); (AeroMexico (with, all flights); Cathay Pacific (with, for a single flight); China Airlines (with, all flights); Delta (with & without – for many flights); JetBlue (of course, with, on all flights); South African Airways (none for two domestic flights, JNB-CPT-JNB); Southwest (several, all without seat-back IFE, or streaming ONLY); United (with [including my personal favorite, the live satellite DirecTV now being made available for free on 211 of its aircraft] & without seat-back IFE); and finally, Virgin Atlantic (of course, ALL with seat-back IFE), and for flights as short as 75-90 mins hops to/from RDU – or as long as 16.5 hours (just last month to/from Asia), I, and virtually everyone I know (family, close friends and even biz people my partner travels with) have ALL said unanimously that they much prefer seat-back IFE over streaming to personal devices when they fly!
And lest one think my limited survey sample is confined to middle-aged or older folks, they’d be wrong(!) as there are plenty of Millennials (and younger) in our families, too, who prefer robust offerings on seat-back IFE over using ones’ own personal devices!
First of all, seat-back IFE is mounted – so there’s NO FUSSING about holding, securing, stabilizing, etc., a device to watch movies, tv shows, etc. while inflight.
Of course, apart from not having to hold, or hold down, ones’ own personal device for what quickly begins to feel like an eternity after about 10-15 mins of switching hands just to watch anything when aboard (vastly) inferior planes lacking real seat-back IFE, when one is aboard a plane equipped with real, seat-back IFE they need not worry about dropping their device if they fall asleep (and then possibly even fearing a need to search countless rows to wherever their device may have slid away to while they were sleeping…); or more likely to be a real pain-in-the neck, using their device during any beverage (or snacks/meals be they “free”, brought on board, or bought on board) service where things in my/our experience has always been the trickiest, and most unpleasant part of the super lame “streaming to ones’ own device” format.
Call me crazy, but notebook computers take up the entire tray table in coach/economy, so there’s ZERO space leftover for any (liquid) beverages were I to even attempt putting a cup filled with liquids anywhere near an electronic device on a larger desk/table at work/home!
But, even for an iPhone or tablet, they just don’t play well positioned next to each other on ANY tray table when flights are smooth as silk, let alone even the slightest, and most occasional turbulence.
They just don’t.
The devices are constantly slipping and sliding on tray tables, and having liquids close by – and in open containers no less – even when there’s no turbulence has yet to be a flight where I/we can sit back, relax, and let go of our devices while watching whatever is on, whether there is a drink, or NOT, on the tray-table.
Simply put, our experience on a great many flights in recent years aboard planes lacking REAL seat-back IFE (be they streaming IFE types, or worse, those with NO IFE at all and requiring pre-loaded content to have any inflight entertainment option) is that relying on our own devices (especially if we want to have any beverages or if we eat anything inflight) is a nuisance we more often than not just do without given the hassle factor.
It just is.
And yes, for families with young children, expecting them to have individual devices for all of their children to use is preposterous!
So, yes, news of United making its by far best in class DirecTV with its 100 channels available for free is GREAT NEWS – it’s just too bad it’s limited to only 211 of its Boeing 737s since that’s a small portion of its domestic fleet that one cannot know with any certainty more than a few days’ before departure if the 737 their flight will be operated with will have it – or if they’ll find themselves stuck aboard the great many of United’s other 737s (brand new or old) that don’t have any seat-back IFE (let alone DirecTV) at all, as I have on a few United flights in recent years (where the library for its streaming IFE was not just bad, it was downright terrible, too).
The only airline I’ll offer a bit of a “free pass” for offering only streaming IFE is Southwest – and that’s because there are so many other passenger friendly aspects that Southwest provides as part of its core product (such as NO change fees; NO checked bag fee for 1st two bags; more pitch on its mainline narrow-body aircraft than American, United, or even Delta have in their Main Cabins); plus its usually very good customer service, that its lacking real seat-back IFE is an acceptable trade-off.
Oh, and unlike say, United, whose streaming IFE had next to nothing worth watching on the flights I was on (albeit they were about 20 months ago), Southwest’s streaming content, including several network broadcast and cable TV channels, offered options that included shows I/we wanted to watch – when we weren’t drinking anything or our hands weren’t weary from taking turns holding our device in place, that is 😉
Perhaps those in 1st or biz class, where there’s cup holders or a flat space in a nice, wide armrest (or an even more spacious countertop) offering enough of a separation from ones’ own personal device, or where there’s no need to choose between allocating the tray-table space to EITHER a notebook computer OR an open container filled with liquids, it might not be as cumbersome to use ones’ own personal device to stream/watch video programming!
However, for the vast majority of flyers (typically 85%) crammed into the ever smaller and smaller (chicken coop sized) seats densely packed into 30”-31” pitch (or less) no legroom rows, there’s hardly any room to have any electronic devices anywhere near open containers filled with liquids.
That’s not a theoretical opinion – but rather one based on an open mind going in, and keeping an open mind for many flights thereafter on a variety of airlines and aboard a variety of aircraft (mainline and regional) versus flights with real seat-back IFE (also on a variety of airlines and aircraft) before it became abundantly clear that streaming IFE is a poor substitute for seat-back IFE.
In fact, in our/my experience, we’ve found streaming IFE to be such a hassle, that more often than not (at least for flights limited to the US east coast), we simply do without it instead of being bothered with all of the high maintenance required to hold/secure any devices we’ve used (iPhone, tablet, notebook computer) aboard flights that lacked real seat-back IFE – or something we (derisively) refer to as “baby-sitting” our devices.
Indeed, more and more, and especially for my partner who flies much more than I do (due to his job which requires meeting buyers/clients and/or visiting overseas factories and production teams), if the airline lacks fleet-wide (or predominant in the case of Delta) seat-back IFE, then that airline is not likely to be considered, let alone booked, for any of our flights – expecially given the stank eye (and crabbiness) I know I’ll have to deal with from my partner who finds the opportunity to catch up on movies he misses because of his work schedule the best part of his business trips!
So, yes, props to United for making (my/our personal favorite IFE) DirecTV free!!! YAY!!!
It’s just too bad that unlike JetBlue, one cannot book their flight with any certainty that their 737 will be one that has it – and a “maybe it will, maybe it won’t” sorta thing isn’t exactly gonna win any awards for product/brand consistency, is it?
Just sayin’ 😉