Video Bites: Snackable IFE Content Satisfies Pax & Creates Ancillary Revenue Opportunities
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APEX Insight: Short videos make for appetizing in-flight entertainment snacks that passengers can savor before and after a feature film.
More than 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, drawing in close to five billion views per day – not counting platforms such as Vimeo, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. Far from jumping the shark, web content has jumped offline to reach what is arguably still the apotheosis of cultural validation – curated distribution on preprogrammed channels. This includes entertainment on airplanes. If a feature film is a full meal, web videos are the tapas of in-flight entertainment (IFE), and passengers are hungry.
“For long hauls, passengers know they can invest in a full movie, while on short hauls, people may want something that fits better,” says Philip Corke, VP of Business Development for Gone Viral TV, which delivers short-form web-native videos to offline channels. “Our product is better suited for short flights, or flights with enough time after a full-length movie to still invest in something [shorter].”
There’s also the fear that a flight could land before a movie ends, leaving the viewer hanging in suspense. “Most people want to watch something all the way through,” says Kevin Clark, CEO of Bluebox Aviation Systems, adding that snack-sized IFE is particularly palatable for quicker jaunts. “Movies become less relevant and shorter content items are more appealing.”
Despite the proliferation of in-flight Wi-Fi and IFE offerings that cater to personal electronic devices, passengers aren’t simply hitting YouTube mid-flight and bingeing on puppy videos. Trends suggest in-flight Wi-Fi is still too expensive for that. Short-form video for IFE passes through a gatekeeper who must program for a general audience – meaning PG-rated content. Corke says he shies away from featuring videos that contain swearing and drugs, as well as religion and politics.
Viveka Nilsson, international sales and marketing manager of PIAS Comedy, also notes that edginess is a factor in selecting content for IFE sales. Sex, politics and religion are edgy, Nilsson says, which is precisely why comedians like to talk about them. Since PIAS offers content ranging from mild to spicy, it’s able to convey the language and tone of each piece to airlines on a granular level.
“We see how it has performed online, giving us a better read of its success.” – Philip Corke, Gone Viral TV
Web videos come with the advantage of predicting popularity among passengers: “It’s still not an exact science for independent networks, and we still rely a lot on our customers to provide viewer statistics,” Corke says. “The great thing about our content, versus that on a traditional TV channel, though, is that we [see] how it has performed [publicly online], allowing us to get a better read on its success than a traditional program.” Gone Viral TV’s roster of content creators boast a combined 52 billion online video views, as well as more than 300 million subscribers. Analytics keep getting better, Corke adds, which makes the curation process easier.
Having sealed content deals with carriers such as Air France and Brussels Airlines, PIAS Comedy is expanding its IFE presence. For Nilsson, that means looking beyond raw numbers. Selecting artists for IFE distribution, she says, “is more similar to the music business than to the film business. We look at the long-term career of the artist – that’s the ethos.”
“There’s quite an attraction in blending content with ancillary revenue.” – Kevin Clark Bluebox Aviation Systems
Clark points out that short-form content also creates transition points, similar to commercial breaks between videos, that lend well to ancillary revenue opportunities. “There’s quite an attraction in blending content with ancillary revenue,” he says, be it sponsored content, advertising or destination-based multimedia.
“If you have snackable content, you’re playing to the mindset that the passenger may watch something for 15 minutes and then go and do something else,” Clark says. And that could be a segue for an in-flight purchase.
“Video Bites” was originally published in the 7.3 August/September issue of APEX Experience magazine.