Rockwell Collins yesterday unveiled a cabin entertainment system called Skybox that is designed to act as an Apple TV device capable of storing up to 1 terabyte of data that can be accessed in the cabin on HD monitors as well as on up to 10 iOS devices, such as the iPad, iPhone and iPod. The idea is for business jet passengers to have access to the same entertainment and presentation capabilities they’re used to at home and in the office, Rockwell Collins said.
Skybox allows everyone in the cabin to have on-demand access to movies, TV shows, music or any other information that can be loaded into iTunes or iBooks and has been uploaded into the system. Besides the entertainment capability, Skybox allows the cabin to be turned into a meeting room in the sky, where presentations stored in iBooks can be shown to all the passengers in the cabin.
Customers can also send information that is not in the Skybox from an iPad to the cabin monitor via a wireless access point. The system does, however, not allow iOS devices to share data.
Rockwell Collins said it will likely offer this capability to other devices, such as Android devices, in the future.
