Airplane travel is about to become slightly less awful.
For years, commercial airlines have created such a fundamentally unpleasant, cramped, and gross experience that mankind has collectively overlooked the fact we are partaking “in the miracle of human flight.” And while airplane flights will continue to be terrible (save for Tywin Lannister, Smaug the dragon, Floyd Mayweather, and other gold-hoarding villains who can afford to fly like this), Amazon’s announcement about its new off-line video service is going to the make the extended torture of airplane travel at least somewhat more bearable. According to a recent article in the Verge:
An update to the company’s mobile video apps for each platform — now renamed “Amazon Video” — lets Prime subscribers download the service’s streaming titles for viewing, just as customers had been able to do on Amazon’s line of Fire devices. The change takes one of the biggest inconveniences of streaming services and removes it from the equation entirely. Now, if you’re in the middle of binging Downton Abbey and need to jump on a plane, you won’t have to go without; you’ll be able to download a number of episodes and take the Crawleys with you.
With this new service, you can now load movies and entire seasons of content from Amazon’s ever-expanding, silly-large, and high-quality collection of Prime content onto your phone or tablet. That means you are no longer tethered to the heavily-edited movies in the in-flight service (as unintentionally hilarious as they may be), and you will no longer have to take out a small-business loan to pay for Gogo’s terrible WiFi to find entertainment during your flight. You can just take out your iPhone or Android device, sync up the latest episode of Catastrophe, and enjoy world-class entertainment while you sit in your dangerously tiny seat in a giant flying tube full of disease, loose sewage, and literal goddamn snakes. And remember, you paid actual, government-approved currency for the privilege of doing this.
When reached for comment, Netflix sighed, hung up the phone, then stared out the window for the rest of the afternoon.
