Air Canada is significantly expanding its inflight entertainment, boosting available content by roughly 50 percent on selected aircraft.
The carrier has formed new partnerships with Crave, Bell Media’s premium entertainment service, and Stingray, a Canadian multi-platform audio provider. These agreements will add fresh content to many of Air Canada’s Boeing 777 and 787 aircraft, as well as Air Canada Rouge’s A319s, A321s and B767s. Upgrades for the airline’s A330 fleet are scheduled to take effect later this year.
Travelers can expect a broader selection of TV series and films, including popular series such as Billions, Ray Donovan and The Affair, along with Crave originals like the comedy Letterkenny and Comedy Central’s Broad City. Stingray will enrich the audio offering with additional music content, including concerts, documentaries, curated video playlists, artist interviews and award show coverage.
The enhancement also brings a redesigned system interface that supports browsing in 15 languages, making it easier for a diverse international customer base to find and enjoy entertainment options.
Air Canada says the partnerships will enable the airline to offer more than 1,000 hours of onboard entertainment — a catalog the company describes as the largest of any airline in the Americas. That total is equivalent to the entertainment available for the duration of about 72 nonstop flights between Toronto and Hong Kong.
“Air Canada will be the only carrier to offer full seasons of Crave programming, while music lovers will be able to enjoy a much wider array of songs and genres from top artists through Stingray,” said Andrew Yiu, vice president of product at Air Canada. “We’re also significantly expanding the selection of movies and television shows on our newest wide-body and narrow-body aircraft.”
These upgrades include access to full-season box sets of series such as How I Met Your Mother, complete collections of film franchises like Harry Potter and The Matrix, more recent releases from Disney, and expanded programming from HBO. The carrier is rolling out the new user interface progressively so customers can more easily select and manage their entertainment choices in their preferred language.