Short Stuff: In-Flight Entertainment

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder,

move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that. They're now the best network,

according to the experts at Uclaspi tests, and they use that network to launch SuperMobile,

the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security,

and seamless satellite coverage. That's your business supercharged. Learn more at SuperMobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible device and most outdoor areas in the US where you can see

the sky. Best network based on analysis by Uclah of Speed Test Intelligence data to H 2025.

We're always talking about how things work and one thing that keeps your car running smoothly

is regular oil changes. But life's busy, and the oil light always comes on at the worst time.

Well, that's why there's take five oil change. It doesn't just save time. It gives you control

of your day back. You pull in, stay in your car, check something off your to-do list, no waiting room,

no pressure, you're in and you're out in about 10 minutes. Oil changes include tire pressure

checks and fluid top-offs, and the friendly staff explain everything and welcome you with a free

water. Take five fitting into your busy schedule is something you should know. Find your near shop

at take five dot com. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's

here sitting in for Dave and this is short stuff about in-flight movies. All the great stuff

that you can watch when you fly with your favorite airline. Yeah, and this is something that if you've

been flying for a number of years has changed quite a bit. Yeah. I do remember the old days where

I didn't fly a lot growing up at all. Like I think it flew one time before I went to college.

And then not even a lot after that because I was always broke. But I did go on a couple of flights

back in the day where they had the one movie being shown for the entire plane and there were

these big huge like Volkswagen Beetle-sized monitors that dropped down from the ceiling like every

10 rows right in the middle and maybe 30% of the flight could get a good angle on that screen.

Yeah, and if you were lucky you were close to that one big screen version that was like broadcast

shown on like the wall in the middle rows. Yeah, that was how we used to watch movies. Everyone

watched the same movie at the same time you plugged in your headphones that were like hydraulics if

I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah, air travel episode. Just do a tube. Yeah, and you watch that same

movie and because there's all sorts of different people with all sorts of different tastes the movie

you saw was radically different from the movie that you would find on like your video store.

Yes, for sure. One movie, whole plane. We will tell you the very first in-flight movie, believe it

or not, was in 1929. It was a news reel in a couple of cartoons on a trans continental air transport

flight, but real deal movie service started in the early 60s. This comes from Variety and CNN

and how stuff works. But nowadays it's a whole different deal because we have broadband connections,

we have servers on board. Everyone knows now you can stream like over 100 movies probably even

a couple of decades ago you probably just had 10 or 15 movies you could watch because they were

just stored on a hard drive I guess. Right. But now they have all kinds of movies. You can play

games against passengers, you can read e-books, listen to podcasts or music or whatever.

Right there either on the feedback screen or on your laptop or tablet or whatever.

Yeah, it is quite a time to be alive for that. But I guess the whole problem, the whole issue that

faced airlines back in the day, which was how can you show a movie to a bunch of different people

is still around in different forms. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they cost them a ton of money.

Apparently some airlines spend like $20 million per year just on licensing the content.

Then you got to outfit the planes. That can cost about $5 million per aircraft.

And it makes it a lot heavier. So there was a guy, an econ professor in Norway that basically

calculated all the weight and everything and said if airlines got rid of this stuff,

they can save about $3 million per year per aircraft by not having this on board.

Right. Which I mean, they're like, well, so what? We make so much more than that.

Yeah, but they pass along the savings to us. I'm sure. For sure. Yeah, of course.

Apparently, depending on where you are, I think in the United States, you pay something like 90 grand

for one movie for a couple of months. Yeah, for license. And then other licenses are

by a purview. So every time somebody watches a movie, you have to pay a certain amount,

probably not 90 grand. But still, there's all sorts of different ways that airlines have to dig

in their pockets to make sure you have all the movies you want. So feel bad for the airlines.

Yeah. I don't know if this is for everybody, but I even call them airplane movies. It's a hotel

movie. It's a movie that I probably wouldn't pay for or go see in a theater, but I will totally

get like, had enough interest to watch it. Right. I will do that on airplanes almost a hundred percent

of the time. I won't watch either that or like an old favorite. But I watched F1, the Brad Pitt

Formula One movie on this last flight recently. And it was okay. That was an airplane movie.

Too much minimalist like office stuff for me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was lousy with that.

I saw some, I was watching note over somebody's shoulder. Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of that. I mean,

the racing stuff was really, really great. I'm sure obviously much better on a big screen.

But it was one of those where like, not most, but a lot of people don't understand Formula One racing.

So the entire time, like the race commentary was so explanatory. And now he has to go do this,

because that means this, because the rules say this. And it's just incessant. And it helped you

understand it. But it was really pretty, pretty bad. Like inception. And that respect. Yeah,

like inception. Let's take a little break and we'll come back and we'll talk about some of the

stuff that airlines have to do to make sure that no one gets offended by their movies. All right,

we bury it back.

Imagine never buying gas again. Well, you can with an electric vehicle. EVs are easy to charge

as your phone and perfect for everyday life. You can drive daily with confidence everywhere you go.

Most Americans drive just 40 miles a day and most EVs are equipped with 200 to 400 miles of range.

Plus they've got fewer parts. They require fewer repairs and they produce fewer headaches.

And with all of those pluses, it's no surprise that we're seeing more and more EVs on the road,

which makes the planet happier and happier. The way forward is electric. You can learn more about

EVs at electricforall.org. Support for the show comes from public.

Lately, the line between investing and gambling has started to blur. But let's be real.

You can't build actual wealth on a coin flip. That's why public takes a different approach.

It's the investing platform where you can build a serious long-term portfolio.

Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, they have it all. But unlike platforms that basically just give you

a buy button, public provides actual context. So when you see volatility in your portfolio,

you aren't just staring at a chart. You're reading a helpful explanation about why the stock

is up or down. You can even go deeper with the built-in AI research assistant.

It's all about giving you the information you need to invest with conviction.

Be right more often. Go to public.com and earn an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your

investments. Public. Investing for those who take it seriously.

Adpaid for by public holdings, brokerage services by public investing, member Finra SIPC,

advisory services by public advisors, SEC registered advisor. All investing involves

risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures.

All right, so you were saying airplane movies are ones that you would normally never pay to see.

I get that. There's also airline versions of movies. And they come in a bunch of different ways.

Sometimes the airlines like commission companies to edit the movies that they're going to show.

Other times the studios themselves will make an airline cut where they edit out, you know,

the sexiest stuff or the most violent or gory stuff or like jokes. Like you probably couldn't

show any of the Austin Powers movies because of all the mean stuff about different cultures.

They figure out how to edit that out in the best way possible so that it doesn't screw up the

plot, which was not what they were doing before when they showed the same movie to everybody

at the same time. It was just really clumsy editing then. Yeah, for sure. It's kind of funny.

Some of the things I'll edit out. Apparently they'll add out other airline logos, which I

didn't know, which is hysterical. Not so hysterical. You're never going to see a movie about a

a terrorist or certainly like a hijacking or a plane crash or anything. You're not going to see

that Denzel Washington movie. Like you're not going to see anything like that, which makes a lot

of sense, of course. Sure. But depending on where you are in the world too, there's different cultures

that are going to find different things offensive. You've got to be aware of that. In Europe,

they're way more okay with a little bit of nudity, maybe a little bit more sexy stuff, but they're

not as much as into the Goran violence. The Middle East, apparently any kind of bear skin or

sexy stuff you can't have, but they have a little higher tolerance for violent scenes on their flights.

Right. Airlines that carry a lot of Muslim passengers will frequently have like any references to

pig or pork or anything like that. Edit it out. Singapore apparently is sensitive to scenes or

movies with LGBTQ plus content, which means they can't get enough of it is what I'm reading.

I don't think that's the case. In language, you would think like, well, they got to edit that out,

but that's not the case anymore. It doesn't seem to have been the case ever since they started

showing on-demand individually selected movies because you listen to them through headphones,

generally. Through headphones. They have the little caveat now where they tell you beforehand

this contains scenes of violence or whatever, brief nudity. You have to tell whether or not you

want to proceed beforehand. I'm still a bit of a prude. I was raised Baptist, so I'm always

very sensitive to other people's experience around me. I would never be the guy that's just watching

some awful thing on their screen with people all around them, just totally clueless that

kids are around or other people that might be offended. I've always been sensitive to that,

but there's an actual trade group, the airline passenger experience association,

because there are no laws about this. They will offer guidance, I guess, to movie distributors

and to airlines and stuff like that. There have been some sort of, I don't know about famous,

but at least gone viral online for how could they edit that out? I know when the film Carol came

out in 2015, which is about a lesbian couple in the 1950s, Delta got a lot of guff because they

edited out scenes of women kissing. Delta was like, hey, that's the movie they gave us.

But apparently, there is a guy who runs a company that House of Works talked to Amir Somnani.

He's Vice President of Content Services for Global Eagle, which is like the big company that

edits films for airlines. He had said, he wasn't saying this to contradict Delta,

but he said airlines actually have a lot of say in what gets edited out. It seems like Delta

was like, no, we can't show lesbian stuff. Whereas American Airlines and United are like,

they're all like Singapore. They're like, bring it on.

Yeah, there was in 2007, there was a co-sponsored bill called the Family Friendly Fries Act,

where they wanted to have child-safe viewing areas on the plains, where anything over G

couldn't be played, but I think it never passed. I'm sure it didn't pass because that's

a near impossibility or just a terrible idea to be like, we'll put all the kids in the back of

the plane together without their parents. I was looking at this, and there was Congress people,

congressmen from North Carolina, and it does, especially today, sound just preposterous.

But in their defense, this was 2007, and this was a time when planes still mostly showed

the same movie to the entire airplane at the same time. Well, that makes sense a little more sense.

Right. It did. It did to me too. And I was reading just basically an article on it from the time,

and they were like, well, one of the problems is it's like, you don't want to just show only

g-rated movies because everybody on the airplane is going to hate kids even more than they already do.

That was a quote from it. So they landed on if this did happen to just show PG-13 as a compromise.

Yeah. All right. Well, that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. And if you're wondering how much gets edited out, someone actually

did check running times of movies shown on Virgin Air and Air Canada. They had funding.

That's right, which will be flying soon. When we do our Canadian tour, we got some Air

Canada flights book. Can't wait. You got that straight. And they found that two-thirds of the movies

shown on these two airlines were the same length as the theater presentation. 14% were shorter,

not 14% shorter, but 14% of the movies overall. So that just sort of tells you how many movies

are being edited down for content. 21% were longer, which is sort of interesting.

Yeah. I would guess Virgin is not huge on editing down movies, but you never know.

You never know. So yeah, Chuck said you never know. I guess Chuck didn't mean that short stuff is out.

Indeed.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.