Air France is becoming the latest airline to partner with Apple TV to offer passengers the chance to watch award-winning shows like Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, and Silo at 38,000 feet. There is, however, one frustrating feature of this collab that needs to be discussed.
On Thursday, Air France announced that from this month, it will become the first airline in Europe to give passengers on all long-haul flights access to Apple TV shows.
Shows will be available in English and French, as well as with subtitles and accessibility options for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. All the shows will be available via a dedicated Apple TV channel, making it easy to browse through the available shows.
But here’s the problem. Once you’ve found the show that you’ve been dying to watch or even rewatch, don’t expect to binge-watch the entire season over the course of your flight.
Air France is limiting each season to the first three episodes of the show. In total, there will be just 45 Apple TV episodes available on any given flight, with the selection rotating every two months.
It’s worth comparing Air France’s partnership with Apple TV to that of rival United, which became the first airline in the world to offer full first seasons of some of the studio’s biggest hits.
While Air France is limiting Apple TV content to just 45 hours, United offers 250 television show episodes, feature documentaries, and films. The other difference is that United offers the content on seatback screens on both short-haul and long-haul flights, as well as via its mobile app.
Air France is, at least, starting the rollout of broadband-quality Starlink internet across its fleet, including short-haul and regional planes, meaning that Apple TV will be available via ‘bring your own device’ streaming.
For passengers who don’t already subscribe to Apple TV, the airline is also offering free access to Apple TV for a week, via a special Wi-Fi portal on Starlink-enabled planes.
Matt’s take
There’s possibly nothing more annoying than browsing the selection of TV shows on a seatback entertainment screen and discovering that an airline has unfathomably decided that what people really want to do is watch random episodes across several different seasons of a popular show.
Understandably, storage space is limited on older in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems, and choices have to be made, but I fail to see how the apparent scatter gun approach to selecting content is meant to enhance the passenger experience.
Unfortunately, the new trend of partnering with big TV studios and their steaming services is making this issue even worse. More often than not, these partnerships are about giving passengers a very small window into what these streaming services offer without giving away too much.
The hope is, of course, that passengers will then be tempted to sign up for the streaming service to finish the show they started watching during a flight.
Apple wants more subscribers, so why should they offer everything for free? If you like what you watched on a plane, subscribe to AppleTV at home, that is their intention.
Personally I don’t care about the IFE anymore. I put the flight map for the entire flight, and for the rest I’ve loaded everything to watch or listen to on my own device. With Starlink becoming available on a growing number of planes, not even preloading devices will be necessary anymore. And on long haul flights I use to sleep a lot anyway.