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As a showcase for BitTorrent DNA, check out Ringu: a great Japanese thriller from Kadokawa Pictures:

I was by coincidence on flight 641, JetBlue’s inaugural flight with in-air wifi service and I am a bit disappointed. Although this is being touted an industry first, I was an enthusiastic user of Connexion a lot when flying from SFO to Munich on Luftansa. That service was great – you could get full web access with the in-flight wifi service at roughly ~128 kbps (that’s a guess), which was enough to browse pages with images and even make VoIP calls (your fellow passengers would love that). Not enough to stream video smoothly or get your torrents rollin’, but I gladly paid the per flight fees (which weren’t cheap!) for access.

And then there’s Beta Blue. After a bit of fanfare at take off, Jet Blue’s marketing department and representatives from Live TV (their subsidiary providing this service to Jet Blue and I believe Virgin America?) strolled the cabin trying to get people online. At 10,000 feet the service began and it was glitchy at best. I couldn’t get pages to load at all and when I did, I got the following splash screen when trying to load google.com:



Yep, that’s right, only 2 web services available: Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, which in reality was Yahoo WAP Mail: http://us.m.yahoo.com/p/mail and Yahoo Web Messenger: http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ with a special “In Sky UI”:



No other web pages permitted, and connectivity was extremely slow. Couldn’t keep a constant connection to the messenger service and could never dream of running a video stream or P2P download...



Unless of course the airline kept a BIG web+ P2P content cache in the plane! That could be very cool if pre-cached with a few terabytes of high quality videos and popular websites. And with plenty of in-flight bandwidth over the wifi radio and a bittorrent client that supports zeroconf, I could get very excited about the possibilities.

Now in going through that big expense in building out and launching Beta Blue – did anyone think to put AC outlets in the seats?? Seems like a no brainer with the wifi and all. Once you do get a connection (good luck!), better hope you have enough juice to use it!