Hot Topic: Virgin America’s Cutting Edge “Red System” Keeps Some of Its Best Features Hidden—Like Its Wireless & RHDD Data Loader from IMS

Last weeks Hot Topic garnered a lot of interest from the IFE community so we decided to dig a bit deeper. Here are the results of one of the innovative hardware solutions on the Virgin America’s planned IFE.

There has been much media interest in Virgin America’s “Red System” IFE offering that includes a Panasonic AVOD system and DISH Network live TV, along with a range of amenities and comforts to dazzle the passenger. But one of the cutting edge technologies behind Virgin America’s “Red System” is as distinguished by what you don’t see as what you do. One example is Inflight Canada’s iCACHE system that houses the IFE seat boxes in under floor compartments. We saw this brilliant use of cabin under-floor space at the WAEA a couple of years ago and were wowed with it then.

One of the most important of the aforementioned hidden technologies is the Terminal Data Loader (TDL) from IMS and Formation that puts Virgin America in the front line of content data loading by way of wireless transfer and removable media. Like American Airlines and British Airways, Virgin America will install IMS’ TDL onboard the aircraft where it will support automatic wireless transfers utilizing 802.11 and GSM or CDMA. Depending on the TDL configuration chosen by the airline, data from movies to system software can be loaded to—or offloaded from—an aircraft using a DVD or CD, a USB memory stick, a removable hard drive (the choice of Virgin America and American Airlines and/or an AIT tape (the choice of BA).

This is important because the content loading takes place automatically, onboard the aircraft, as aircraft and IFE conditions permit. Removable media or wireless transfers eliminate the volume of tapes that used to characterize content loading. TDL accommodates high-volume loading through the 50-200GB capacity AIT tape drive or 100GB removable hard drive (RHDD), medium-volume loading using 8.5GB-capacity DVDs, and low-volume content loading using a CD or USB memory stick, or automatically using a wireless link (we like this feature for various reasons). In addition to 802.11 b/g capability, the TDL contains either a tri-band (900, 1800 and 1900 MHz) GSM/GPRS phone or CDMA phone that provides a wireless, bi-directional data link to the aircraft.

Hollywood can relax—because the TDL can decrypt content in real time, movies never need to be transported in the clear—end-to-end encryption from post-production to the aircraft (Note, wireless interception would be foiled by the encryption). IMS assures us that TDL provides the only automated method in IFE today to update content encryption keys to give studios a comfort level about key replacement…and we haven’t seen any currently-implemented solution that can duplicate that claim. Stay Tuned!

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