Southwest Airlines partners with Apple's iTunes
Southwest Airlines partners with Apple's iTunes — Southwest Airlines may not have video screens built into the backs of its airplane seats, but that doesn't mean the carrier can't offer its passengers inflight entertainment — and turn it into a new revenue stream.
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal only exists because of the connectivity groundwork Southwest laid earlier: after years of testing onboard access (reaching for Wi-Fi in the sky as far back as 2007), the carrier committed to a fleetwide Wi-Fi rollout in Q1 2010. With no seatback screens and every passenger carrying an iPhone, iPod, or laptop, Southwest's move is to monetize that pipe by selling iTunes content mid-flight rather than installing hardware.
First-order effects
- Passengers on Southwest's Wi-Fi-equipped planes get a way to buy or rent iTunes entertainment in-flight, giving Southwest a new ancillary revenue stream with no per-seat hardware cost.
- Apple gains a captive retail venue at altitude — a sales channel aimed at travelers with time, money, and devices already loaded for media consumption.
Second-order effects
- Carriers that have invested in embedded seatback entertainment systems face a sharper question about whether that capex beats a bring-your-own-device model built on cabin broadband.
- Other airlines and content owners now have a template for similar partnerships, putting pressure on whoever controls the Wi-Fi billing relationship to bundle media instead of charging purely for access.
Third-order effects
- If buying content over cabin Wi-Fi proves out, inflight entertainment shifts structurally from owned screens to airline-as-retailer arrangements, making media companies stakeholders in which carrier a passenger chooses.
- Apple's broader travel ambitions — visible in its iTravel patent application for a travel-centric iPhone app — suggest these cabin deals are part of a wider play on the traveler's device, not one-off licensing.
The trend: Airlines are converting cabin Wi-Fi from a paid amenity into a commerce platform by partnering directly with media companies, displacing seatback hardware as the default inflight entertainment model.