Posted Apr 22, 2005, 2:00 PM ET by Peter Rojas

Related entries: Portable Video, Transportation

They won’t say who it was, but Microsoft’s Engineering Entertainment Center has something on their weblog about how an unnamed airline contacted them about building WiFi networks inside planes so that passengers could stream video on demand to their laptops or handhelds.

They aIn-flight on-demand streaming moviesctually got a prototype system working over 802.11a (which has more bandwidth than 802.11b and is usually a little less crowded than 802.11g). Not sure when or if this’ll ever become a reality, but regardless of whether they choose to connect that in-flight wireless network to the wider Internet or not (obviously you know what we’d prefer), something like this actually makes sense for older planes that don’t have video screens at every seat.

Put a media server with a few hundred GB of storage on it and you could point passengers to a web browser where they could pick from hundreds of different movies and TV shows.