On the Road: Fast Wi-Fi on Flights May Serve the Airlines, Too

You remember Steven Slater, the fed-up JetBlue Airways flight attendant who got on the cabin speaker after his flight landed at Kennedy Airport and declared, “That’s it. I’m done”? He then grabbed two Blue Moon beers from the galley, deployed the emergency chute and slid away into infamy. Ever since, many an unhappy flight attendant has told me she’s sometimes quietly considered pulling a Slater.

Recently, on a crowded plane approaching Dallas, I watched a flight attendant collect trash in a bag with one hand while using her fingertips to hold five empty soda cans for recycling, while simultaneously checking that seat backs were in the forward position for landing. I wondered, could the airlines possibly manage to give more chores to crew members?

Why certainly! You may have read recent news reports about proposals by regulators to devote more airwave capacity to providing faster Wi-Fi connections on commercial airplanes. You may have assumed that those initiatives, in the United States and abroad, are intended mainly to allow passengers to use the Web and e-mail more efficiently.

But the fact is, despite the rapid expansion of Wi-Fi on airplanes, no one has found a profitable way to cover installation costs with the scant revenue generated by the limited number of passengers who have been willing to pay for Internet service at 35,000 feet.

The great advances in airplane Internet connections are being driven far more by the opportunities that high-speed broadband service presents for airlines themselves to essentially sell more things to the customers, whether the product is in-flight entertainment, food and drink, customized services to elite-status passengers or products at the destination, including hotel packages, sports and concert tickets, restaurant and theater reservations. On an airplane, you have a captive market, and with sophisticated technology, you can sell to passengers in very personal ways.

And, of course, flight attendants will be expected to become even more adept at using in-flight technology. The question is whether they will embrace the moment.

“We found consistently in our research, whether the markets were the U.S., Europe or Asia, that flight attendants are typically the least automated group within the airline work force,” said Andrew Kemmetmueller, the chief executive of Allegiant Systems, a technology development company that focuses on airline operations.

Allegiant Systems, based in Las Vegas, recently announced FlyDesk, a product that has an iPad-based application for processing food and beverage sales on flights. The company expects that FlyDesk’s iPad technology will evolve into many other uses in the hands of flight attendants, Mr. Kemmetmueller said.

Besides direct product sales, opportunities for customer service expand when flight attendants have in their hands not just recycled soda cans, but tablets linked by high-speed Wi-Fi to real-time flight and customer data.

“Buy on board is only one aspect. I live in Toulouse,” he said, referring to the city in France, “but have a base of operations in Las Vegas, which puts me on planes a lot.” As airlines market more flights in partnership with other airlines belonging to the same global alliance, a single long-haul flight to Las Vegas could entail a domestic European flight from Toulouse to Frankfurt, a trans-Atlantic flight on a Lufthansa A380 to San Francisco and then a domestic connection on United Airlines to Las Vegas.

Mr. Kemmetmueller echoes a familiar complaint among international passengers that partner airlines in a global alliance like Star Alliance aren’t especially adept at sharing detailed information about individual passengers and their status. United Airlines, for example, might have detailed information about the status and service requirements of a given elite passenger, but tablet-enabled technology in the hands of flight crews would make that data available for each leg of an alliance trip.

With major improvements in Wi-Fi, we’re only starting to see some of the ramifications for passengers and airlines, which depend mightily on the revenue raised by selling and marketing things other than the basic fare.

But what about that overburdened flight attendant trudging down the aisle with a stuffed trash bag?

In my experience, flight attendants complain about everything, even more so than those world-famous complainers, pilots. But Mr. Kemmetmueller insisted that putting sophisticated technology into the hands of the flight crew, and encouraging crew members to adapt it as they saw fit, overcame even dug-in resistance to performing more chores because the chores became easier. “I think an iPad trumps all,” he said.

Next we need an app to address those empty soda cans.

YouTube to Serve Niche Tastes by Adding Channels

The oddball videos of gurgling babies, teenagers crashing their skateboards and synchronized wedding dances are still there. But they have been increasingly buried under what YouTube calls original channels — polished, highly produced videos financed by YouTube. It is part of YouTube’s strategy, started a year ago, to lure television viewers and advertisers by helping to produce high-quality videos that cater to niche interests.

Now Google, which owns YouTube, is stepping up that effort. On Monday, it plans to announce that it is adding more than 50 original channels to the 100 it has introduced in the last year and expanding original channels to France, Germany and Britain.

Other online video platforms — including Amazon.com, Netflix and Hulu — are also trying to compete for viewers by creating original content. But transforming from platform to producer has been challenging for all, including Google. And it is hard to argue that YouTube, or any other video platform, is on a path to soon replace television — whether for viewers, content makers or advertisers.

“There are not any successes you can point to and say, this happened because of Google’s investment,” said James L. McQuivey, who studies digital video and television at Forrester. “What they’ve learned is that they haven’t invested enough.”

As part of the new effort, Google is investing a fresh $200 million to market the shows. It is also investing an additional, undisclosed amount -- on top of the $100 million it invested last year -- to pay for production equipment and, in some cases, pay the full production costs.

The new channels, which will carry advertising and be available free, include producers with major media experience. ESPN has a sports channel, Grantland; Sarah Silverman and Michael Cera have a comedy channel, Jash; and Everyday Health has a beauty and health channel, Daily Glow. There are also smaller, online-only producers, like Tastemade and PopSugar.

“I believe that every interest will, at some point, have a channel serving that interest,” said Robert Kyncl, global head of content at YouTube. “People are building channels and creating audiences, which is something they couldn’t do before in such numbers.”

YouTube says that its push in this area has already created successes.

The top 25 original channels average more than a million views a week, according to the company, and in the year since original channels were introduced, people have increased the hours they spend watching YouTube each month to four billion from three billion.

Several YouTube video producers, including AwesomenessTV, StyleHaul and Blip.tv, have received venture capital financing. Some have been acquired by big entertainment companies, including Nerdist Industries by Legendary Entertainment and Revision3 by Discovery Communications. And YouTube-financed channels have attracted prominent advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Toyota and American Express, though it did not give specific ad revenues.

Even so, YouTube is nowhere close to being the default home for high-quality video, analysts say.

Video producers, Mr. McQuivey said, “are interested in this, but they’re not about to risk giving up a pilot on NBC in order to do a new YouTube channel.”

Advertisers, meanwhile, “still hold the 30-second spot on a pedestal, and the idea you would put that creative content into that inferior channel still bothers a lot of them.”

Though advertisers will increase their spending on digital video ads 46.5 percent to $2.9 billion this year, that is a small fraction of the $64.5 billion they will spend on television, according to eMarketer.

And viewers who have spent decades in front of their televisions are not about to throw them out in favor of YouTube, he said.

YouTube has learned the same thing, so it is going after younger people who have grown up online.

“The thing we learned is it’s certainly best to fish where the fish are,” Mr. Kyncl said. “In terms of making investment decisions and putting dollars at risk, we’re going to focus on audiences of 35 and below, who are already on YouTube.”

As a result, much of YouTube’s original programming may seem foreign to older audiences, like casual comedy skits full of Internet references. But other programming has attracted critical acclaim and Hollywood stars. WIGS, for example, shows TV-quality dramas aimed at women that star actresses like Julia Stiles and writers and directors like Marta Kauffman, a creator of “Friends.”

In addition to financing production, YouTube sells ads for the video producers. It takes its initial investment out of the ad revenue.

“That’s their secret sauce, a huge sales force all over the world,” said Jim Louderback, chief executive of Revision3, which will have a new tech channel on YouTube. “We’re pretty excited that huge sales force is going to be spending time finding revenue opportunities for the stuff we’re doing.”

Video producers say that in addition to financial support, YouTube offers a way to bypass television’s frustratingly slow production schedule.

Nerdist Industries recently decided to make a music video with the Fraggle Muppets. Three weeks later, a music video was on YouTube, made with the band Ben Folds Five, the actors Anna Kendrick and Rob Corddry, the Jim Henson Company and Chris Hardwick, the television actor and founder of Nerdist.

“What we found amazing about the opportunity was to go from ideation to production and having content in front of our fan base in a ridiculously short amount of time, and content that’s produced at television-level quality,” said Peter Levin, chief executive of Nerdist Industries.

Another contrast with traditional television is that it is much easier for video creators to get a start and gain a following. YouTube says that minorities who have historically been underserved by network television, for instance, have popular channels on the site, like Michelle Phan’s Fawn and NuevOn, a Spanish-language Hispanic pop culture channel.

“There’s a giant pot of money that is controlled by the broadcast and cable television industries, and it’s because there’s comfort and scale and predictability,” said David Grant, president of PopSugar Studios and a former president of Fox TV Studios. “There’s a fair amount of ways to go — years — before the online video industry has enough scale to move those dollars over. But it is inevitable.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 8, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to Google’s plans to invest in original YouTube channels. Google will invest $200 million this year to market the channels, and an undisclosed amount for production on top of the $100 million it invested last year for production and marketing.