Gogo TV takes in-flight entertainment experiences to new heights with AWS

Leading in-flight broadband internet provider Gogo recently committed to moving its entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), going all-in on the world’s leading cloud. Gogo is improving in-flight internet and entertainment experiences for millions of passengers around the world, leveraging a range of AWS services, including analytics, serverless, database, and storage. AWS services help the company to develop and deploy applications in hours instead of days, double the number of airlines it supports with its current workforce, and take an idea from concept to production much faster.

The company also uses AWS Elemental Live video processing and delivery to provide the consistency and low latency required for live and on-demand video at 30,000 feet. Gogo’s transition to AWS comes at a time when the demand for content is intensifying, with 60 percent of global airline passengers citing in-flight Wi-Fi availability as a necessity when choosing an airline and booking a flight[1]. That number is considerable given that the equivalent of more than half the world’s population (4.1 billion) took off in airplanes in 2017[2].

A pioneer of in-flight entertainment experiences, Gogo was the first to enable commercial airlines to stream video to passengers’ smart tablets, to stream pre-theatrical and first-run movie titles to devices, and to install FTE wireless systems aboard thousands of aircraft. To help airlines maintain high-quality viewing experiences and scale with passenger demand for more varieties of in-flight entertainment, the company is using AWS Elemental Live to process and deliver live and on-demand video services on board more than 2,500 commercial aircraft.

GogoTV, Gogo’s live TV service, relies extensively on AWS Elemental solutions to power transcoding for 24 live TV channels across five airlines. Distributed from a centralized headend in the US, GogoTV captures content from international providers. That content is backhauled via fiber to the Gogo IPTV headend, where it is transcoded to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) using AWS Elemental Live.  In addition to HEVC, AWS Elemental also provides support for statistical channel multiplexing. As a result, Gogo is able to deliver consistently broadcast-quality viewing experiences with low latency to passengers. AWS Elemental solutions also enable Gogo to use significantly less satellite communications bandwidth.

To find out more about how Gogo is using AWS services, please visit https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gogo-goes-all-aws.

[1] Source: Inmarsat Global Inflight Connectivity Survey, 26 July 2017
[2] Source: International Civil Aviation Organization, 17 January 2018