A slew of Oscar-winning and nominated films like Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt, The Dark Knight, and Tropic Thunder are in the entertainment bouquet for travelers flying by Virgin America, a California-based airline.
It has unveiled a new entertainment line-up on its touch-screen entertainment platform – Red. This spring, travelers on Virgin America will be able to use the Red touch-screen on their seatback to select from a new library of 25 on-demand films.
The airline also announced that Wi-Fi is now available on nearly half of its fleet – with 13 of its new 28 Airbus A320-family planes equipped with Gogo In-flight Internet service. Wi-Fi provides wireless connectivity to computer systems like laptops.
“Our guests are even using in-flight Wi-Fi to send tweets, Facebook updates and love letters to us from the sky. Now for the first time travelers can check for flights that offer Wi-Fi when booking online,” informs Porter Gale, Vice President of Marketing for Virgin America.
Red platform also features live TV, video games, seat-to-seat chat, 3,000 MP3s, music videos and more. According to the company, software upgrades to the Linux-based (Linux is a computer operating system) Red system will go live this summer, allowing for even greater functionality and speed.
Virgin America says it offers Wi-Fi Internet service on 13 of its planes, including all of the flights on the carrier’s new Boston routes. Gogo In-flight Internet is available for $12.95 for daytime flights of over three hours, $9.95 for daytime flights of less than three hours, $5.95 on red-eye flights and $7.95 for handheld devices.
As of April 5th, all flights between Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles will be Wi-Fi enabled. By the second quarter of 2009, Virgin America expects to offer in-flight Internet fleetwide.
It plans to introduce more video games, movies, a new television channel line-up, a “Best of the Web” category and more new content in the latter half of 2009 – all of which will be based on Linux upgrades taking place this summer.
Photo courtesy: Virgin America
