United everyone watches the same movie

On Friday I took a 5-hour flight from the east coast back to southern California. It was a strong reminder of how much I dislike flying, especially when it’s an early morning flight crammed in the back of a plane without much leg room.

Thankfully I was spared by AirPods and enough sleep deprivation to pass out for a large portion of the trip. One thing I noticed on the place was hoe good in-flight entertainment systems have become in recent years. Sure, they can’t hold a candle to a home theater or even an iPhone with headphones, but they’ve gotten much better than they used to be both in terms of variety of options and display quality.

This got me thinking… what if there wasn’t as much control for a user? What if people had to vote on one movie that would loop the entire flight?

The bonding experience of watching a movie with strangers is fun, but I’m doubtful this can be recreated on a plane. The lack of control here would be extremely frustrating, and I can see people hating a feature like this.

That said, some content is better than none, right?

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