YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) – Take a plane ride today, and you have many in-flight entertainment choices.
The planes we fly have onboard servers and broadband so you can stream newly released movies and classics.
But how does the airline make sure that offensive content doesn’t pop up?
Your movies are already censored.
For the biggest movies, the studios themselves create an “airline version.”
They have no bloody violence, no steamy love scenes, and absolutely no talk of plane crashes or terrorists. Those words are never spoken.
And there are content companies whose job is to edit and distribute customized versions of Hollywood movies to suit different tastes all over the world.
The airlines can be lenient when it comes to streaming. They might run a disclaimer: this movie may have unsuitable content. Then you as the passenger have to say, “Yes, I still want to watch it.”
Some movies actually turn out to be longer than you might have seen in a theater. The airline is showing you the “director’s cut” or some other version made for home viewing.
The first in-flight movie was a newsreel and two cartoons shown on October 8, 1929, on a Transcontinental Air Transport flight.
Regular in-flight movie service didn’t begin until the early 1960s, but sometimes you had trouble seeing them through all the cigarette smoke.
