Hot Topic: Viral Marketing, Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America, Blogging, and YouTube - Get It?

If you work for an airline... show this to your boss!

From The Virgin America Blog:

Take an exclusive look at the technology behind "Red", Virgin America's In-Flight Entertainment System

In the first of a two part series on Virgin America's new In-Flight Entertainment System "Red", Director of In-Flight Entertainment and Partnerships, Charles Ogilivie, takes you on an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of some of the cutting edge technology employed in "Red".

Charles gives a live demonstration of the system while explaining each of the features and the technology that powers the system, including the Linux-based screens, servers, the live and streaming video components, audio on-demand capabilities, a QWERTY keyboard and game controller at every seat, even the open-source games like DOOM. In fact, they'll also be opening up their system to Linux developers who want to participate in Red.

Some of the other features you'll see:

• 9 inch integrated touch screens at every seat
• Full QWERTY keyboard/game controller to interact with all applications
• Live TV provided by Dish Network
• The world's only In Flight Program guide (IPG) for live television
• Over 25 Hollywood Pay-per-view movies available completely on-demand
• Email/SMS/instant messaging/chat rooms, providing an airborne social network
• An audio experience with over 3,000 mp3 tracks - allowing guests to customize their playlists - as well as 20 radio channels
• Open source video games (and a future invitation for savvy linux game developers to participate in Red)
• All aircraft are equipped with wireless access points and are broadband-ready
• Ability to order food when you want it directly from your seat

Now check out this video on YouTube

If your boss still doesn't understand viral marketing, try this website www.letvafly.com.

Cool huh?

PS: Virgin America assembled an IFE team over the past 2+ years to put together one of the most interesting and exciting IFE offerings on a domestic fleet ever. On Virgin America’s team are Panasonic, who built the seatback & server-side hardware, ITAN the antenna supplier, IMS the supplier of the system’s wireless dataloader that uses Sprint’s high speed data network when aircraft are at the terminal, CoKinetic & Wunderman built the software and interactive and a number of content providers & studios (Echostar, Pace, Spafax, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, and Warner) who all worked together on the content side.

Oh BTW, next series of announcements to look for here probably will relate to the Red System’s broadband capabilities, content & software…the link below outlines the Linux development effort...Stay Tuned!

• Linux developers interested in writing software for Red should check out this information.
   

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