VOD Outage at 30,000 Feet

Las Vegas — Personalized TV is a sometimes-flaky technology, as any hapless cable subscriber wrestling with a VOD menu can attest.

Certain VOD technologies aren’t even able to scale to handle a fully packed Boeing 757.

On my Continental flight to Las Vegas today, the airline’s in-flight video-on-demand system — which provided access to 18 movies, 16 TV shows and short features, 50 music CDs and games — went kablooie. 

Continental just last month completed rolling out the audio/video on-demand system, supplied by Panasonic, on all 39 of its 757-200 planes, according to a Dec. 5 press release from the airline. The boot sequence that scrolled across the screens indicated that the software running Panasonic’s VOD system is based on the Red Hat Linux operating system.

The flight crew was on the case, apologizing for the snafu and explaining that the system would take about 5 minutes to reboot.

Soon enough, we were back in business. But dangit, I had to restart Austin Powers in Goldmember from the beginning and twiddle my thumbs while the single-speed fast-forward caught up to where I’d left off — that ain’t my bag, baby!