Short Stuff: In-Flight Entertainment

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – "Short Stuff: In-Flight Entertainment"

Host: Josh (A) and Chuck (B)
Date: March 11, 2026
Episode Theme:
A brisk, fun exploration of the history, costs, culture, and quirks of in-flight entertainment—how it started, how it’s changed, and the surprising challenges airlines face in curating the content you see at 30,000 feet.

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1. Evolution of In-Flight Entertainment

[01:21] Josh: “If you've been flying for a number of years, it has changed quite a bit.”

• Single Movie, One Screen Era: Early flights (as late as the 90s) featured one big communal screen, “Volkswagen Beetle-sized monitors” every 10 rows; only a minority of passengers got a good view.
• [01:58] Chuck: “Everyone watched the same movie at the same time. You plugged in your headphones that were like hydraulics…just through a tube.”
• First In-Flight Movie: 1929—a newsreel and cartoons on a transcontinental flight.
• Major Movie Service: Started in early 1960s; now sourced from outlets like Variety, CNN, and “How Stuff Works.”
• On-demand Era: Today, broadband and onboard servers offer “over 100 movies,” plus games, ebooks, podcasts—either on seatback screens or your own device.

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2. Costs and Logistics

[03:47] Josh: “Apparently some airlines spend like $20 million per year just on, like, licensing the content…and it makes it a lot heavier.”

• Equip a plane for IFE (In-Flight Entertainment): About $5 million per aircraft; adds weight and cost to operations.
• Norwegian economist estimates cutting IFE could save $3 million per year, per aircraft.
• Licensing Models:
  • U.S. Airlines might pay $90,000 for a movie for a couple of months.
  • Other models charge per view.
• [04:59] Josh, on culture: “I even call them airplane movies…a movie I probably wouldn’t pay for or go see in a theater, but I will totally get, like, had enough interest to watch it.”

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3. The Special Genre: “Airplane Movies”

• These are films you’d only watch on a plane—“a hotel movie,” or an old favorite you wouldn’t seek out elsewhere.
• [05:29] Chuck (on a recent choice): “Too much minimalist, like, office stuff for me.”
• Josh (on Formula 1 movie): “The racing stuff was really, really great…I mean, not most, but a lot of people don’t understand Formula One racing. So the entire time, like, the race commentary was so explanatory…It helped you understand it, but it was really pretty bad.”

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4. Censorship, Edits, and Cultural Sensitivity

[09:00] Chuck: “There’s also airline versions of movies.”

• Studios or third-party companies (e.g., Global Eagle) edit out sex, violence, or culturally sensitive jokes.
• [09:52] Josh: Airlines sometimes even edit out other airline logos.
• You’ll never see movies about plane crashes, hijackings, or other flight disasters.
• Global Cultural Differences:
  • Europe: More tolerance for nudity and sexuality; less for gore.
  • Middle East: No “bare skin or sexy stuff” but higher gore tolerance.
  • Muslim-majority airlines: Remove “any references to pig or pork.”
  • Singapore: Sensitive to LGBTQ content.
• Language and Warnings:
  • Language edits are now rare—“You listen through headphones…they have the little caveat now where they tell you beforehand [about sensitive content].”
  • Users opt-in to content warnings.

Notable Quote:
[11:20] Josh: “I'm still a bit of a prude…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 like kids are around…”

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5. Regulation, Guidance, and Controversies

• No laws dictate airline movie edits; rather, industry trade groups (e.g., Airline Passenger Experience Association) advise on best practices.
• Notable Case:
  • 2015: Delta criticized for removing lesbian kissing scenes from “Carol” (Delta says “that’s the version we got”; Global Eagle exec Amir Somnani says airlines have plenty of say in the edits).
• [13:10] Family Friendly Flies Act (2007):
  • Proposed child-safe viewing zones (only G-rated movies); died in Congress—impractical to “put all the kids in the back of the plane together.”
  • At the time, many planes still showed one movie for all passengers.
  • PG-13 was considered as a compromise.

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6. How Much Gets Edited?

[14:25] Josh: “Someone actually did check running times of movies shown on Virgin Air and Air Canada.”

• Findings:
  • Two-thirds of movies were identical in length to their theatrical releases.
  • 14% were shorter (edited for content).
  • 21% were longer (possibly director’s cuts or extended versions!).

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7. Memorable Moments & Quotes

• [04:59] Josh: “I even call them airplane movies…a movie I probably wouldn’t pay for or go see in a theater, but I will totally get, like, had enough interest to watch it.”
• [09:52] Josh: “…they’ll edit out other airline logos, which I didn’t know, which is hysterical.”
• [11:20] Josh: “I’m still a bit of a prude…I would never be the guy that's just watching some awful like thing on their screen with people all around them…”
• [13:57] Chuck: “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.”

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8. Wrap Up

• Airlines work hard (and pay a lot) to provide a wide variety of movies and entertainment at high altitude.
• The challenge: balancing cost, technology, and incredibly diverse cultural sensibilities, with no universal rules—just lots of case-by-case negotiation and occasional controversy.

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Useful for First-Time Listeners:

• This episode is a rich, humorous crash course in why the movies you see on flights are so weird, what’s missing, and why, with a dash of Josh and Chuck’s signature wit and cultural trivia.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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 I 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.

[B]

Yeah. And if you were lucky, you were close to that one big screen version that was like broadcast or shown on like the wall.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[B]

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 from our air travel episode.

[A]

Just through a tube.

[B]

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. At your video store.

[A]

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 newsreel and a couple of cartoons on a transcontinental air transport flight from. 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, you know, stored on a hard drive, I guess.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But now they have all kinds of movies. You can play games against passengers, you can read ebooks, listen to podcasts or music or whatever. Right there, either on the seat back screen or on your laptop or tablet or whatever.

[B]

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? It's still around in different forms.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. I mean it costs them a ton of money. Apparently some airlines spend like $20 million per year just on like licensing the content. Then you gotta 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.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, but they'd pass along the savings to us, I'm sure.

[B]

For sure.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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 and then other. Yeah, for license. And then other licenses are like by a purview. So every time somebody watches a movie you have to pay a certain amount. Probably not 90 grand, but still like there's all sorts of different ways that airlines have to kind of dig in their pockets to make sure you have all the movies you want. So feel bad for the airlines.

[A]

Yeah, I don't know if this for everybody, but I even call them airplane movies. It's sort of like a hotel movie. It's a movie that I normally like, I probably wouldn't pay for or go see in a theater, but I will Totally get, like, had enough interest to watch it. I will do that on airplanes almost 100% 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. It was an airplane movie.

[B]

Too much minimalist, like, office stuff for me.

[A]

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

[B]

I mean, it was lousy with that. I saw some. I was watching it over somebody's shoulder.

[A]

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, like, 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 bad.

[B]

Like Inception in that respect.

[A]

Yeah, like Inception.

[B]

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.

[A]

All right, we'll be right back.

[B]

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[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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. 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. 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.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. It's kind of funny. Some of the things I'll edit out. Apparently they'll ed out other airline logos, which I didn't know, which is hysterical. Not so hysterical. You're never gonna see a movie about a terrorist or certainly like a hijacking or. Or a plane crash or anything. You're not gonna see that Denzel Washington movie. Like, you're not gonna see anything like that. Which makes a lot of sense, of course.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

But depending on where you are in the world too, there's different cultures that are gonna find different things offensive, and you gotta be aware of that. So, like in Europe, they're way more okay with like a little bit of nudity, maybe a little bit more sexy stuff. But they're not as much as into the gore and violence. The Middle east, apparently, any kind of bare skin or sexy stuff, you can't have. But they have a little higher tolerance for violent scenes on their flights.

[B]

Right. Airlines that carry a lot of Muslim passengers will frequently have, like, any references to pig or pork or anything like that edited out.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Singapore apparently is sensitive to scenes or movies with LGBTQ content, which means they can't get enough of it is what I'm reading.

[A]

I don't think that's the case.

[B]

And 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.

[A]

Yeah, through headphones. And also they have the little sort of caveat now where they tell you beforehand, this contains scenes of, you know, violence or whatever, brief nudity. And you have to tell whether or not you want to proceed right beforehand. And you know, I think. Cause I was, 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. Like I would never be the guy that's just watching some awful like thing on their screen with people all around them just totally clueless that like kids are around or other people that might be offended. So I've always been sensitive to that. But there are, 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 like, 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. And so Delta was like, hey, that's not us, that's the movie they gave us.

[B]

But apparently there is a guy who runs a company that how stuff works. Talk 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 like airlines actually have a lot of say in what gets edited out. So it seems like Delta was like, no, we can't show lesbian stuff. Whereas American Airlines and United are like, they're all like, they're like Singapore. They're like, bring it on.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There was, in 2007, there was a co sponsored bill called the Family Friendly Flies 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 and 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.

[B]

I was looking at this and it was congresspeople, 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.

[A]

Well, that makes sense. A little more sense, right?

[B]

It did. It did to me too. And I was reading like a. Just basically an article on it from the time and they were like, well, one of the problems is 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 PG13 as a compromise.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Well, that makes sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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.

[B]

They had funding.

[A]

That's right. Which will be flying soon. When we do our Canadian tour, we got some Air Canada flights book. Can't wait.

[B]

You got that straight.

[A]

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.

[B]

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

[A]

You never know.

[B]

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

[A]

Indeed. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.