My Experience With Southwest Airline's Live TV

As I wrote here, my Southwest airplane to Chicago was going to be equipped with WIFI/Live TV. I was excited about trying it out. You see Southwest is trying something different. Instead of equipping their planes with entertainment systems, they have created a system that transmits entertainment content directly to passengers' ipads, computers, or even cellphones.

Here is a video describing Southwest's new service:



My Experience With Southwest's Live TV

My flight from Washington's Dulles (IAD) airport to Chicago's Midway airport was only about an 105 minutes long. This gave me about 75 minutes with the new system.

First, I tried to use the system on my Kindle Fire. I was able to log into the wifi, but I couldn't get the Live TV to play.

I then tried to access the Live TV on my netbook and had success. After opening the wifi on my laptop, the Southwest's entertainment website opened up. On this screen, there will be a drop down menu detailing the options available to you:

Under the games section, there are two games. Both of which are free:

I then went to see which movies were available. The selection of movies that were available was amazing. I counted over 25 movies ranging from comedies to drama to children's movies. There was something for every member of the family.

What impressed me was that each movie was only $5. That's a great price. $5 is the top price I pay to rent movies from Amazon. I did not rent a movie, because I didn't have enough flight time to watch it. 

Another cool feature of the system is that it shows the time left on the flight. On the top bar, there is a little airplane to show the progress of the flight:

The status is a great feature, but the plane did not move on its own. You had to refresh the screen to see how much time was left in the flight. This is something Southwest should fixed.

Click on the Destination button and you will get a flight map. The map shows where the flight is at the moment. The screen also has monitors showing the altitude, heading and ground speed.

Below the map is a five day forecast of the destination of the flight:

The one section that I did try was the live television.  Currently, the live television is free due to Dish. Thanks Dish! There is 15 Live Channels and about 30+ TV Shows. The preloaded TV shows are from the TLC, Food Network etc. Nothing really excited me. Therefore, I decided to watch some live TV.

As you can see, there is a wide range of channels. Once you load the live TV, a television schedule appears with what is on each channel. Again, the schedule does not update as time goes on. Another thing that needs to be fixed, Southwest. 

The TV screen is tiny. Super tiny. This little picture is less than 1/4 of my computer screen. I though there was a button to increase the size of the screen, but no one existed.

I was very impressed with the quality of the live television. It was clear, next froze or needed to be rebooted. The other thing that impressed me was the speed in the show loading after switching channels. I switched channels at least 50 times and only once did the show not load. That's amazing!

Overall, I was very impressed with Southwest's IFE system. There decision to use passenger's systems is brilliant. Instead of spending money on putting TVs in each seat, Southwest built a great platform to use. I only used the Live TV feature, but I am excited to use the wifi to surf internet and movie features on future flights.

Two thumbs up on my first experience.

Have you used Southwest's new IFE system?

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