Another signal of Group's widening digital services interest.
Further evidence of Deutsche Telekom's (DT) interest in the inflight communications and entertainment market came with signs of collaboration with Airbus Group on an on-board sharing platform for "user-generated" media.
A patent application, submitted in the USA earlier in 2018, envisages creation of a "temporary media library" for passengers of a "public transport structure or vehicle", including aeroplanes, buses, and trains.
Filed by DT and Airbus Operations, a subsidiary of the aerospace giant, the application suggests intent to make entertainment systems "more flexible", and focuses on enabling the content users bring with them for the journey to be made available to their fellow passengers, via a central server. Users might be "incentivised" to share their own films, music, and other files by "being able to access other passengers' content", it surmises.
The filing envisages anonymisation of users' content and use of authentication technology to ensure copyright compliance, both when media is loaded to the server, and when access is closed off. To this end, the document indicates that media would be made available to users "at least for the duration of the journey" – and perhaps beyond, with travellers either offered "temporarily limited" access or the ability to purchase "permanent rights" to the library's content. "Only certain content that can be authenticated can be uploaded from the personal electronic devices to the central server as part of the content-sharing approach, in order to ensure that the copyright of the content is protected", the filing says.
The filing notes that the "shared" content would augment transport operators' own entertainment offerings, and that this "improves the variety of entertainment content on offer… which, in turn, increases customer satisfaction".
No information was provided on future plans for the offering. However, the media server would evidently dovetail with DT's varied connectivity initiatives in the transport market. These include the Group's high-profile European Aviation Network inflight broadband initiative with satellite operator Inmarsat, as well as Wi-Fi service provision tie-ups with partners such as Deutsche Bahn and Lufthansa (Deutsche Telekomwatch, #72 and passim).