Come chat with me on Ustream on my Virgin America flight and watch people walk by! I’ll be turning on my camera every hour or so and I’ll be chatting live from 35,000 feet.
I’ll also be IMing with Virgin America’s IFE engineer James Weatherson around 6PM PT today and I’ll post a transcript. He’s in charge of the Red entertainment system on-board all VA flights and we’ll find out what we can expect to see from the in-flight entertainment system this year.
If you have any questions you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave a comment.
Update: If you feel like chatting on AIM then hit me up at crunchtips, kids.
Update 2: James wasn’t able to join us, so we’re going off the air. We’ll update if he manages to get online. Otherwise, we’ll have an in-person interview later this week.
Interesting concept, but Ustream is a sketchy company. Watch out for the co-founders Brad Hunstable and John Ham – They’re untrustworthy and doing business with them is at your OWN RISK.
Sounds like you are disgruntle.
In my experience that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Awww, Peter Ha is sooooo fine !!!!!
Sounds like from a jealous competitor
I would love to read about this some more but I have two close friends who are out of job and while reading about people flying and wasting their time chatting is cool, I think I’ll just click on the X button and move on to more pertinent things. Get a clue kid.
Agreed. This is by far the most homosexual post I’ve ever come across on Crunch. You guys are seriously going to devote bandwidth to advertise a service with some idiot on an airplane? Wow.
Hey, that’s not just ANY idiot.
there is a disgruntled employee on the loose
a very similar post and picture on engadget http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/22/on-virgin-americas-inaugural-gogo-wifi-flight-this-post-publis/
also a very similar post and picture on crunchgear three months before http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/08/20/blogging-live-from-37000-feet-via-aircells-gogo-inflight-wi-fi-on-american-airlines/
CG got a posse
@John You don’t pay to use ustream.tv, he’s not doing any “business” with them afaik.
That is rad. Ustreaming at 35,000 ft.
Why can’t American Airlines have wifi!!! grrr
Some AA flights do have Aircell’s Gogo service, Blogonme611.
Just flew Virgin, what a great experience. Can’t wait till the cheaper flights have them.
Peter, why the craze about Ustream? BlogTV is way better. Try it!
dude, I tried blogtv once – it crashed all the time.
CBS NEWS did live segments for their morning show from a Virgin America plane-excellent quality (it was not Ustream, though).
Right. I was interviewing SIr Richard over IM on that flight.
Wow, this is cool! Sad I was not able to be here on time.
I’ll be streaming again soon, Informixx.
HI Peter,
Can you ask Mr. Weatherson who the best contact is to get our in-flight content on to Virgin?
We have done content for Lufthansa, Swiss & Hawaiian thus far.
Cheers!
So where’s all the champaign and girls in bikinis?
I tried to do a video chat last week and while the WiFi is fast enough for web browsing, it it couldn’t handle the video. Extreme pixelation. None the less, it was fun.
Why are you guys promoting Virgin.
What kind of deal did you get??
Did M. Arrington get some kind of money from Richard Branson?
What gives?
No deal, Chris. I’m taking VA from NYC to SF for GDC. Wanted to try out Gogo since we haven’t tested the service since the initial commercial launch back in August. Wanted to give TC and CG readers a chance to see the Gogo service in action if they haven’t had a chance to fly with Virgin America, American or Delta.
Did Weatherspoon/Virgin do any frequent flyer, ‘air warriors’ quant research to see if their entertainment offering is BOTH relevant + differentiated to target fliers?
Thanks for the nice chat at 35,000 feet Peter!
It’s all very cool stuff what you guys are doing – and for sure it’s highlighting the future of communications and air travel!
Virgin is a great airline and Sir Richard Branson is one incredible innovator!
Hi Peter, this is Sam from the chat!
Thank you for doing this. You are a true pioneer. I was excited to be a part of this.
You rock! I had a great time, Sam
This is newsworthy material?
It’s the future. Get with the times!
It’s not newsworthy, but neither is this.
The CDN we are releasing next month will now have Level-4 packet level application load balancing, click my link and scroll down for more info.
Compared to reverse proxy balancing this is the shiznit. Session data is shared on NFS by 10 different servers so you can persist your customers anywhere on the cluster. When we have more regions they will all share an NFS persistent session store.
It means no bottle neck like Varnish or Squid. No reverse proxy like TechCrunch uses!!!
Pure network application filtering with round robbin hits to all the servers on the network, currently 10, and they are mighty bad ass.
That should say Layer 4 of course and not level 4.
I am taking one of the 10 servers and making it into a Nortel Alteon style switch
bye, bye reverse proxy. Packet routing is hundreds of times faster than opening a TCP connection/handshake and routing the headers forward to the backend services.
Plus our CDN customers will be able to run any supported application type, not just HTTP or website content.
You are misinfomed about some facts…think you aren’t aware of what Msft just released since it addresses a major pt you state
I know about “Big Top”. MSFT R&D doesn’t matter in this configuration.
If customers REQUEST Microsoft windows servers, we can install a couple of them. So far with the initial clients there have been no requests for Microsoft Windows server products.
Even if we have a couple Windows servers in the CDN it will not matter because the Layer-4 large pipe packet routing server will be in front of them.
It sits in front of everything in Region A (Los Angeles). Later this year when Region B(New York City) opens with my friend Jeff running it, there will be a similar layer-4 dual xeon on that large xeon cluster as well. At that point there will be a new DNS server and failover DNS server.
The DNS server will take requests and match them up to a regional IP address mask list. That list will determine what state the person is in. If the person is in a state or country closer to NYC, it will route the request to the IP in NYC, if they are closer to LA, it will route the request to LA’s master IPs.
I will rinse and repeat this until the CDN project is worldwide.
GOOD LUCK..:)
I took an interactive live video class on eduFire a few weeks ago aboard a Virgin America flight. Gotta love technology!!
http://blog.edufire.com/2009/03/08/the-first-live-video-class-from-30000-feet/
Oh yeah, please, please can I sit next to you on my next long-haul flight?!
Coolness factor aside, that’s gotta be really annoying!
Ditto!
This news is SO old – I was doing this and Skyping with video over Siberia on JAL about 9 years ago!
Why they _really_ binned connexion we’ll never know
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexion_by_Boeing
Hi Mik, are you the creator of skype? Cause according to wiki skype’s initial release was august 2003, which wasnt even 6 years ago.
no one cared when you did it because it was communication not broadcasting..who cares about your skype call?
This is just another way for people to be rude and inconsiderate in confined public places. I got into an argument in a movie over some woman refusing to stop texting and emailing on her iPhone. Now I’ll have to have fights with people trying to do video blogs on plane flights? Why is it impossible for people to take a freaking break from their gadgets? No one is so important that they can’t be disconnected from the web for a few hours.
Michelle, you’re a dinosaur and don’t know it. Technology is here to stay. We’ll get more connected with more devices….I’d change your view or else you’ll go nuts….personally, I think this is really great and shows how far we’ve come. No one likes long flights and now that there’s internet on planes (which is a great thing) this is the ultimate way to test it….personally, I’ve gained confidence in in-flight internet due to this….if it can send a Ustream feed then it can do the other stuff I need like email, etc….btw, who argues in a movie theater about someone’s personal phone?
It’s not about being a dinosaur it’s about being considerate of your fellow human being. Yeah, it’s great that we can get the internet anywhere and everywhere. It’s not a good thing when people refuse to show some common respect for others. Texting, checking email, etc in a movie theater is UNACCEPTABLE, neither would doing live video blogging on a airplane. It’s just another way people can show off and say “Hey look at me, I’m sooo important.” Especially when the resulting video blog is a lame useless video like this, that proves my point.
If you actually watched the live feed yesterday, Michelle, you would know that I was being more than considerate to my fellow passengers. I never once spoke or held a conversation with anyone over VoIP or anything along those lines. I think you’re missing the whole point of me having tested the service.
I agree with Peter. I think Michelle is focusing on people using tech rudely…99% of the time it’s fine.
> No one is so important that
> they can’t be disconnected
> from the web for a few hours.
Speak for yourself.
I’m very important.
How very cool! It wasn’t so long ago we had to write our letters, stick a stamp, and wait for a few days for the other party to get the message. Well done.
This is soooo cool. Just the fact that we can be up in the air and online is awesome. We’re getting to the point where you are always connected no matter where you are.
We are waitign you to Turkey? Maybe fly again :)
nice expression in that first picture. looks like you’re 30 seconds into 2 girls 1 cup…