New GUI and actual 4K shine in Cathay’s A321neo Panasonic IFE

Some nine years after Panasonic Avionics first introduced 4K inflight entertainment touchscreens via the Waterfront concept at CES, the hardware and content pipeline has finally brought 4K aboard the aircraft. 

Your author recently experienced his first actual, real-world 4K video on board a Cathay Pacific A321neo this month, in conjunction with Cathay’s launch of 4K content last month (for which, full disclosure, he was a guest of the airline), and the experience was an absolute joy. Cathay is also rolling out its newest graphic user interface (GUI) as part of the 4K introduction into service, and the system is very similar to the one on board Cathay’s latest Aria business suite product.

On sitting down in the excellent Collins Air Rest seats, Panasonic’s 15.6” 4K HDR screen, from its NEXT generation of systems, is expansive and beautiful, with a lovely Hong Kong screen saver on boarding, offering buttons providing easy access to both the excellent flight map and delightful inflight cameras.

Modern cabin design has to take into account the amount of space, light and attention from the enormous modern screens. Image: John Walton

At the top right of the main screen there is a small line of useful information and control buttons, although these are mixed together rather than being separated into categories: wifi availability, a sleep icon, the overhead light, the crew bell, and a combined double-button for the settings and Bluetooth connectivity for headphones. 

It feels like this could use a card sort exercise or some other categorisation work, perhaps separating the lighting and crew call buttons from the IFEC control and status buttons, with consistent button size. Thinking of my enthusiastically travelling 83-year-old mother and other travellers who might be less familiar with the iconography (what does “crescent moon” mean: sleep? do-not-disturb? qiblah?), perhaps the button sizing might also be increased, and some guidance text included.

New to the latest GUI is a Watch Together function, a welcome delight to this frequent flyer, well used to having to set up a movie side-by-side with his partner and then having to do a 3-2-1 countdown, with the inevitable need for a resynchronisation effort at some point during the film.

With an empty seat next to me, I was able to try out the Watch Together function. Image: John Walton

Cathay has intelligently balanced ease of use with the potential for abuse here, with a a mention in the Watch Together notification that this feature can be turned off in the settings menu, and given that the sending seat is identified it should be relatively simple to identify anyone abusing the system.

I liked how Cathay had clearly considered the possibilities for abuse of the Watch Together system. Image: John Walton

The content library was overall wide-ranging, with 4K HDR content limited to a fairly small selection of films, most of which are classics like The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, and The Lord of the Rings, with some praiseworthy Hong Kong classics included as well. Other content remained at standard definition, shown only too plainly on the 15.6” Panasonic NEXT screens.

The Hong Kong classics’ run-time made them a good choice for the route. Image: John Walton

Cathay executives told RGN during a follow-up interview that the blocker to more 4K content is upstream of the airline, with the content owner, content service provider and IFE system provider not yet working well enough together for a wider library of 4K content.

And that’s the rub: on this short flight of under 3h30, sitting down for a full viewing of any of The Lord of the Rings movies is playing flight time chicken with the end of the movie, especially given that there were regular screen-stopping announcements in no fewer than four languages (Cantonese, English, Japanese and Mandarin) before takeoff, after takeoff, during the several periods of turbulence, and before landing.

One of the Lord of the Rings movies is longer than the flight in total runtime. Image: John Walton

On which note: the entire screen freezes to an audio-representation announcement page during every single announcement, which was frankly a poor user experience during a short flight like this.

Cathay executives are in agreement on that, and tell us they are working with regulators to see what might be possible, perhaps including restricting screen-freeze to during only one language’s worth of announcements, guided by the IFE language the user selected.

Overall, though, the new GUI worked excellently and the 4K visual are beautiful. But expanding this to more content, including shorter options like documentaries and episodic television will be crucial.

Your author selected the one single episode on board of the cinematographically superlative Deadliest Catch — winner of more than a dozen Emmys and many other awards for its visuals, and available at home in 4K — and the experience was worse than watching the show on an iPhone, because the big beautiful 15.6” 4K panel makes every compression artifact and other visible visual loss all the more painful.

Why can’t the content pipeline get the one episode of Deadliest Catch on this system in 4K? What’s the risk? Image: John Walton

It has taken some four years since this IFE system’s entry into service, which came with contemporaneous content service provider promises about content resolution and upscaling, for the first 4K content to arrive on board. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take as long to expand the range of content in that resolution more widely.

Cathay Pacific provided flights to enable this article, but all opinions are unfettered and the author’s own.

Related Articles:

• Upscaling to the rescue as 4K content continues to lag for IFE
• Air Rest: the standard-setter for recliner-plus business
• Cathay’s Aria: balancing bleeding-edge IFE and seat technology
• Cathay’s new Aria business breaks cover as elegant mini-suite

Featured image credited to John Walton

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