v:port, originally uploaded by dan taylor

Yesterday we flew from London Heathrow to San Francisco with Virgin Atlantic. One of the highpoints was the best inflight entertainment system I’ve ever experienced.

Two trans-Atlantic journeys ago, with SAS, we were still in the one screen per cabin compartment age. Two films and a couple of TV programs for everyone. (Not to mention long lines for the toilets every time a film ended.)

Last trip, with British Airways, we got seatback screens, and a choice of 12 video channels. This was a massive improvement, but you still had to pay attention to the starting times of films on each channel.

Virgin offers seatback screens, but with on-demand streaming video. There were 52 movies, and dozens of TV programs. You could start them whenever you wanted to, pause, rewind, and fast forward. There was also the usual airline map showing the progress our flight, and a channel that seemed to grab headlines from Sky News off the Internet.

The films were also very current, including 2007 Academy Award winners like “The Departed”, “The Last King of Scotland”, “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Little Miss Sunshine”. Among the many TV series were “Dr Who”, “House”, “The Simpsons”, “Friends”, “Miss Marple”, “CSI”, and a whole section of kids programs.

On top that there were games, including chess you could play with someone at another seat. There were the usual audio channels, but fast forward made it possible to skip songs you didn’t want to hear on any particular channel. You could also send text messages, to other passengers, and at a price to cellphones on the ground. The back of the controller was also a telephone for making calls to the ground (presumeably at the usual rip-off airline prices).

This was not First Class or Business, this was Economy!

Just about the only negative thing was that fast forward was relatively slow, so that when I paused my film 90 minutes in, and for some reason it went back to the beginning, it took a long time to get back to where I had been.

But that drawback was nothing compared to the experience, which made a 10 hour flight go by very quickly.

The only thing missing was proper full Internet access. (That, of course, would also make it possible to use Skype and circumvent the rip-off prices for phone calls, and probably disturb lots of other passengers.)