Next-gen IFE system transforms inflight experience for Peach Airlines passengers
When Japan’s low-cost carrier Peach Aviation Limited was looking to enhance their passengers' inflight entertainment experience and differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market they turned to TEAC Corporation and IdeaNova Technologies.
TEAC and IdeaNova jointly developed a new customized inflight entertainment platform that features playback of movies. The platform uses TEAC’s PortaStream™ PS-V50 a small, lightweight, and battery-driven Streaming Server to host the content and IdeaNova’s Inplay software, which protects and securely streams content to passenger’s personal devices.
Inplay provides passengers with access to DRM-protected content. IdeaNova used Hollywood-grade content security to protect content using Google Widevine and Apple FairPlay DRM. These DRM libraries have been built into the Inplay license servers and are capable of autonomous DRM license issuance without the use of the Internet. This means Inplay license servers can work in any disconnected environment. So even airlines without connectivity can use the service.
For the Peach IFE platform, the DRM libraries were adjusted to support an ARM architecture and an additional level of redundancy was built into server-side Inplay components to improve process uptime and availability. IdeaNova modified its DRM libraries to work on Peach’s customized ARM architecture and ensured that with this modification Inplay components were able to improve process uptime and availability. In addition, the Inplay web player was customized so that it could stream content to PC, MAC, Android, and iOS/iPad devices. And the player was enhanced to handle the JavaScript libraries used by the Peach portal.
The success of the project was due, in large part, to IdeaNova customizing the Inplay software to meet the needs of the highly specialized hardware and operating system hosted by TEAC.
The result: the integration was transformed into a seamless playback experience, smoothly transitioning between movie playback and other portions of the portal. And today, IdeaNova and TEAC are currently working together on TEAC’s next-generation hardware, which will take advantage of IdeaNova’s complete software stack.
Peach’s new Inflight Entertainment system was launched in 2020. Peach has served more than 50 million passengers since the start of operations in March 2012.
