Cine-Traffic in the Air: the Geographies of Inflight Movies from a Selection of European Airlines

Airplanes have emerged as less and less peripheral spaces of cinematic fruition. Inflight entertainment, in-deed, is currently perceived as an amenity commonly provided onboard aircrafts. On these assumptions,theessayexamineson-the-flycinemaprimarilyintermsofindustrialpracticesandcommercialstrategies. Atheoretical overview will clarify some of the issues most recurrently associated to film consumption withinplanes, often described as enclosed topological environments featuring a composite social structure domi-nated by a sense of transience and in-betweenness. Inflight distribution has developed as a crucial stage forthe global circulation of hundreds of cinematic titles, as well as a highly-lucrative niche market. First andforemost, such a unique receptive frame implies questions of physical and cultural mobility. Consequently,the study is based on a multivariable data-oriented analysis, conducted on the onboard video-cataloguesof five European full-service carriers. The findings derived from comparative assessments indicate that in-flight cinema became a sign of the times of civil aviation mainly due to its disruptive role for differentiationamong companies. In detailing this, tensions between local and global stances have necessarily to be takeninto account. Given that the same aggregation of contents may be regarded as a process of branding, theexaltation of various geographies, both on a suvra-national and hyper-domestic level, is identified as themain factor driving the airlines within the filmic selection