How Airlines Invented On-Demand Video

It's Monday, September fourteenth. I flew back from Louisville to San Francisco on Sunday, and it was the first time I'd flown American Airlines in maybe five years. I used to live in Atlanta, where Delta runs the whole airport. The first thing I noticed when boarding was that there was no TV on the back of the seat. Just a little mesh pocket where a screen used to be, plus a plastic clip for your phone.

However you feel about seatback TVs on airplanes, you definitely noticed the last time they weren't there. The story of how they got there — and why some airlines spent a decade removing them, only to change their minds last month — is a story about how we watch things.

Before 1988, flying meant watching a single movie with everyone else on the plane. One screen at the front of the cabin, like a living room with a hundred and fifty people you didn't know. If you didn't like the movie, too bad. If you missed the first twenty minutes because you were in the bathroom, too bad. If the person in front of you leaned back and blocked the view, also too bad.

The first in-flight movie was shown in 1921 — a black-and-white film called "Howdy Chicago," played on a flying boat around the city. TWA introduced regular in-flight movies in 1961, using a twenty-five-inch film reel. The audio came through hollow plastic tubes that plugged into your armrest — you'd stick them in your ears, and sound would blow through them like wind. The whole thing was slightly less comfortable than it sounds.

For decades, this was it. One screen. One schedule. Zero control. Then, in the late 1980s, a guy named Arn Steventon — businessman with a pilot's license — was sitting on a flight watching one of these overhead movies, and he started thinking about something he'd seen at the Consumer Electronics Show: a miniature LCD screen, tiny enough to fit in your hand. What if you put one of those in the back of every seat?

Steventon founded a company called Airvision. It became a joint venture between Warner Bros and Philips — Warner Bros for the content, Philips for the screens. In 1988, Northwest Airlines tested the system on a Boeing 747 flying between Detroit and Tokyo. They installed a hundred and sixteen personal screens across business and economy class. The screens were tiny — two point seven inches, about the size of a credit card — and they weren't on-demand. You had six channels to choose from, all on a fixed schedule, like live TV. Movies, news, documentaries, cartoons.

But it was your screen. You picked the channel.

Seventy percent of passengers said they preferred it to the overhead setup. Plenty of people had never had control over what they watched on a screen before. This is 1988. The average American home had a cable box with maybe forty channels, and you watched whatever was on. VCRs existed — you could rent a movie from Blockbuster and watch it on your TV at home. But a miniaturized, personalized schedule, even for just six channels, on a plane — that was new.

People liked it so much that the entire industry pivoted. By 1992, Emirates put a screen in every single seat across all cabin classes. Fifteen thousand dollars per seat. Other airlines questioned whether it was worth it. Emirates found that passengers loved it, the flight felt shorter, and they came back. Within a few years, Emirates had twenty channels on its Boeing 777 fleet.

In 2003, Emirates launched its ice system — ice stands for information, communication, entertainment. It was the first truly on-demand, pick-what-you-want-when-you-want-it entertainment platform at scale. Five hundred channels of movies, music, and TV. You sat down, scrolled a menu, picked a thing, and it played immediately.

Netflix would not launch its streaming service until 2007. YouTube had only launched in 2005, with a single video of a guy at the zoo. So for a few years in the mid-2000s, you could walk onto a plane, open a screen, and pick from hundreds of movies and TV shows — and the same thing was not possible at home. At home, you had whatever the cable company decided to show you. On the plane, you had five hundred things to pick from.

In 2011, American became the first North American airline to stream video to passengers' own devices — Wi-Fi, Gogo, ninety-nine cents per TV show, three ninety-nine for a movie. By 2017, American decided to go further: no seatback screens on the new Boeing 737 MAX fleet. The logic was straightforward. More than ninety percent of passengers bring a device with them. Phones and tablets have better screens than seatbacks. Why install thousands of pounds of hardware and miles of cable to maintain something everyone already has in their pocket?

So they pulled the screens. Across the new fleet, across many retrofitted existing planes, the seatback went away. You logged into the Wi-Fi and watched whatever American put in its library on your own phone or tablet. It was the same catalog — just on your device instead of the seat. United and Alaska made similar moves. Delta and JetBlue kept installing screens.

In August 2026 — three weeks ago, as I'm recording this — American Airlines announced it's bringing seatback screens back to its entire narrowbody fleet. New planes will get them in 2028. The rest will be retrofitted through the early 2030s. A spokesperson told Runway Girl Network that American is evaluating several technology providers and wants a modern platform that can evolve alongside new technology. The same airline that spent nearly a decade removing screens is now spending billions putting them back.

You sit down, the screen is there. You don't have to set anything up. You don't have to burn your own battery. You don't have to balance a tablet on a tray table that moves every time the person ahead of you reclines. Airlines spent fifteen thousand dollars per seat on these things thirty years ago because passengers felt the flight was shorter, they came back, they paid more. It turns out that's hard to replicate on a phone held up by a plastic clip.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.