The rise of taste-driven inflight entertainment

From views to preferences: The rise of taste-driven inflight entertainment

The inflight entertainment industry stands at a critical juncture. After decades of measuring success through basic view counts and completion rates, airlines are realizing that passengers now expect the same personalized experiences they enjoy on the ground. Three key forces are reshaping how we approach IFE analytics:

• Content saturation meets passenger expectations: Content libraries have expanded dramatically, with some airlines offering over 3,000 hours per flight. Yet, engagement hasn’t scaled similarly. The challenge isn’t more content, but rather the right content for each passenger’s journey.
• Digital transformation accelerates insights: Cloud-based delivery systems generate rich, real-time data, offering opportunities to understand passenger behavior. Airlines can now track not just what passengers watch, but how they engage, when they abandon content, and why certain titles resonate across routes and demographics.
• Experience drives economics in a commodity market: As fare differentiation becomes more difficult, the quality of the passenger experience directly impacts loyalty, ancillary revenue, and lifetime value. Airlines that excel at content curation and delivering value through IFE will gain a significant competitive advantage.

From Data Collection to Predictive Intelligence

Most airlines find themselves buried in raw usage logs, struggling to extract actionable insights. The traditional approach is not just insufficient – it’s a competitive risk.

Airlines should view the analytics value pyramid as a roadmap for capability development, progressing from foundational to strategic impact:

• Stage 1 – Descriptive Analytics: Establish a clear view of past performance; most airlines are currently here.
• Stage 2 – Diagnostic Analytics: Build the ability to explain performance drivers and uncover root causes; this is becoming a baseline requirement.
• Stage 3 – Predictive Analytics: Leverage data to forecast future scenarios, creating a competitive edge.
• Stage 4 – Prescriptive Analytics: Use advanced models to recommend optimal actions, enabling airlines to actively shape desired outcomes.

IFE Analytics Value Pyramid © 2025 West Entertainment, All rights reserved 

Combining with Taste-Driven Analytics

Traditional analytics are increasingly inadequate. They treat all engagement as equal. Viewing 15 minutes of an action film is treated the same as watching an entire documentary. Yet, these are fundamentally different behaviors. WestIQ converts these cultural signals into anonymized propensity scores – so airlines can act on taste without relying on identity.

Taste-driven analytics goes beyond mere behavior, offering insights into passenger preferences and predicting future engagement. By incorporating:

• Micro-genre preferences
• Contextual viewing patterns (e.g., flight duration, time of day, route)
• Cross-category affinities (e.g., content preferences linked to shopping behaviors)
• Cultural nuances (e.g., varying appeal based on passenger origin and destination)

Airlines can create a taste graph that significantly improves predictions, moving from broad demographic assumptions to individualized profiles. This helps optimize content selection, reducing costs by avoiding content that won’t resonate.

Overcoming Data Engineering Challenges

The path to sophisticated analytics is not without obstacles. Based on our work at West Entertainment, we’ve identified four critical challenges airlines must address:

1. Technical fragmentation: Different IFE systems generate data in incompatible formats. The solution lies in unified APIs and standardized data schemas.
2. Latency barriers: Traditional monthly reporting cycles quickly become obsolete. Modern platforms must deliver timely insights.
3. Privacy imperatives: Growing regulatory scrutiny demands insights without compromising individual privacy. Anonymous taste profiling – rather than personal data collection – is the way forward.
4. Organizational capability gaps: Airlines are transportation experts, not data scientists. Managed analytics services offer a solution, delivering insights without the need for in-house teams.

The Personalization Pathway

To achieve truly personalized passenger experiences, a solid analytical foundation is key. Once airlines master capturing and interpreting taste signals, the next step is delivering tailored content recommendations that turn every seatback screen into a curated entertainment destination.

This transformation isn’t just about technology; it’s about reimagining IFE from a commodity amenity to a competitive differentiator that drives passenger engagement, loyalty, and incremental revenue.

The Complete Solution

With West DnA and WestIQ, airlines can leap directly to predictive and prescriptive analytics, transforming raw data into business-ready insights that drive immediate action. Through our partnership with Qloo, we’ve also integrated the world’s richest database of lifestyle and consumer preference data, giving airlines the full picture of passenger tastes.

Get in touch with us and find out more.