NY1 is reporting that American Airlines is now offering a portable entertainment system with daily papers, games, movies and music videos for $7.95 a flight charged to your credit card. Many commercial airliners have built-in entertainment systems, but this is a great solution for the many airplanes that are not equipped for multimedia.
It's not perfect... there's no online connection for web surfing or email, and no word about how fast the battery might run down. But even those of us with a PDA might want one for the newer content. They provide movies that have not yet made it to DVD. It's great to see portable devices with multimedia taking hold in more markets. It won't be long before such things are commonplace even to the non-geek!
Each new device or service like this reminds us that there's quite a battle going on for control of content and content delivery and content control (DRM). It may seem invisible to the general public, but a multimedia market paradigm is forming right before our eyes. Let's just hope that consumers are the winners when all the dust settles.
(Via
www.gizmodo.com, a wonderful source of gadget and tech info.)