“Geotainment” is quickly emerging as a distinct category of IFE.

MondoWindow and a growing number of other companies have recognized the essential nature of location-based content for fliers, and are taking advantage of new technologies to give people what they really want. We call it “geotainment”:  entertaining, informative, and useful content about the real world, customized for the airborne armchair explorer.

In the context of in-flight entertainment (IFE), geotainment is absolutely fundamental. The conventional moving map is always one of the most popular components of every IFE system that has a map. Why?

Because, with the possible exception of the safety video, the map is the only IFE component that is relevant to every single passenger on the plane. Even better, the answers provided by moving maps -- Where am I? When will I arrive? -- are constantly changing, driving passengers to revisit the map throughout the flight.

Now, what happens when you answer those two basic “where/when” questions with deeply engaging content?

You’ve got geotainment. That five-second “where/when” query turns into an entertaining experience that provides deeper insights about the Earth and the passenger’s own journey. That engagement can in turn translate into ancillary revenues through offers targeted around the geographic realities of location, destination, and time (of day/month/year), as well as the passenger’s individual profile and preferences.

We at MondoWindow have been hard at work building a platform specifically to serve interactive geographical content to air passengers.

MondoWindow uses the aircraft’s real-time location and destination as the building blocks for an entertaining and social experience built around the context of air travel. In fact, we’ve been refining geotainment concepts since 2004, when co-founder Greg Dicum wrote the first in his series of Window Seat books to help fliers understand the landscape from the air.

We’re not alone in our efforts to delight and inform passengers with geotainment. Hidden Journeys, a project of the Royal Geographical Society, has curated gorgeous content from their own archives and from across the web corresponding to dozens of air routes around the world. Georadio is working on custom-produced, geo-coded audio snippets that provide real-time narration about the landscape below. Jetway Geographer is publishing printed guidebooks to the sights, stories, and histories unique to specific airline routes. Rocks from Above is a well-illustrated blog -- a “geologic field guide at 35,000 feet” -- with copious examples of landforms linked to Google Earth. In addition to Greg’s Window Seat books, America From the Air: A Guide to the Landscape Along Your Route is another book that makes use of printed route maps to interpret what’s below. Landprints: On the Magnificent American Landscape is a classic of popular geology from 1984, and it also includes common air route maps cross-referenced with the text. A very recent development in the genre is Skyhook Wireless’ recent release of an airborne location feature in its Android software development kit, which might enable a whole new batch of mobile developers to create geotainment apps for passengers.

Geotainment is quickly emerging as a distinct category of IFE.

The geotainment trend is powered by two key factors. On the ground, passengers are already used to location-aware personal devices, geotainment apps, and web mapping. In the air, the rollout of WiFi networks and Internet connectivity provide methods of acquiring real-time location in-flight and of delivering location-based content to all manner of devices in the cabin.

(WiFi and/or connectivity are important because consumer-grade GPS chips in smartphones do not work in the sky nor at jet speeds; consequently, geotainment applications must acquire real-time flight location data via an onboard server or the Internet.)

MondoWindow is creating the contextual platform for useful, beautiful, and profitable location services in the aircraft cabin. And we’re in increasingly good company as geotainment emerges as a dynamic center of innovation within IFE. In fact, we see this as yet another indication that our vision for the future of IFE is coming faster than anyone had imagined.

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