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RAVE™ Tally Grows as Royal Air Maroc Selects The IMS Company’s Seat-Centric IFE System on B747 and B767 Aircraft

Dépèche transmise le 28 mars 2012 par Business Wire

HAMBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At the opening of the Aircraft Interiors Expo today in Hamburg, the momentum behind “seat-centric” IFE continues to grow unabated as Southern California based The IMS Company, announced this morning that Royal Air Maroc has chosen its RAVE™ inflight entertainment system for four wide body aircraft. Installations begin in the fourth quarter this year for three B767 and one B747 aircraft. Each aircraft will have 15-inch displays in Business Class and 9-inch displays in Economy Class.

“Royal Air Maroc needed a system that could be delivered with an aggressive schedule, without sacrificing features and reliability and at a competitive price; The IMS RAVE solution was the only choice in the industry that met all three objectives”

The order increases The IMS Company’s RAVE™ backlog to approximately 150 aircraft. Seven other airlines opting for RAVE™ include airberlin, Airtransat, Air Tahiti Nui, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Lufthansa German Airlines and SriLankan Airlines, with additional announcements expected during the Conference.

RAVE™ is a new concept in inflight entertainment that improves upon traditional systems by leveraging the best attributes of both traditional AVOD systems and portable-player IFE. The concept has gained considerable traction in the inflight entertainment industry.

The seat-centric inflight entertainment system differs from traditional “server-centric” systems in that each seatback display unit (SDU) contains all of the content, applications and playback functionality to provide the passenger with audio and video on demand—just like portable solutions. Unlike the server-centric model, which stores content in large disk arrays, RAVE stores content locally at each SDU. In this innovative system architecture, the unit in the seat does not depend on large, complex networks and media servers to stream content. Any anomaly on a server-centric network can cause the entire inflight entertainment system to fail, or at least some number of seats in a zone served by a variety of distribution boxes. But RAVE’s autonomous SDUs avoid the “single point of failure” scenario.

“Royal Air Maroc needed a system that could be delivered with an aggressive schedule, without sacrificing features and reliability and at a competitive price; The IMS RAVE solution was the only choice in the industry that met all three objectives”, says Harry Gray, Vice President Sales and Marketing of The IMS Company.

In RAVE’s architecture the system control unit (SCU) provides the interface to the aircraft Passenger Service System. It performs bulk content loads in the background while the current content is played back to the passenger. The SCU also distributes video in real-time such as safety videos and boarding music via the fault tolerant gigabit Ethernet cabin network. But the locally-stored content at each seat is never subject to network failure.

The simplified network eliminates seat-boxes and provides slim, light-weight, low-power seat displays. The system is lighter and more reliable than traditional inflight entertainment systems and costs far less.

The high-definition display SDUs with touch screens are fully interchangeable and easily replaced by a flight attendant in the event of service failure with no impact on any other seat. The SDU storage is solid state and the capacity is defined by each airline to fit its content strategy. The SDUs are easily upgradeable—up to 4 Terabytes—to meet the needs of each airline as its content requirements expand. The SCU has up to 12 Terabytes of storage capacity.

RAVE™ gives The IMS Company an opportunity to apply more than 16 years’ experience providing IFE expertise to others by way of engineering services support to its own fully certified AVOD product with a system architecture that reflects its positive experience as the industry leader in portable media solutions.

About The IMS Company: Founded in 1996, The IMS Company is an entertainment and communications solutions provider in the travel industry, and a systems and software solutions provider to the air transport, aerospace and government markets.

IMS Entertainment provides commercial airlines with embedded and portable entertainment systems, wireless communications solutions, and content management services.

IMS Engineering provides engineering services, software development, information architecture, workflow and cloud computing.

IMS Flight Deck produces Electronic Flight Bags and associated software applications for use on commercial and regional aircraft, and by individual pilots.

In 2007, 2008 and 2009, The IMS Company was named among the fastest-growing privately-held companies in technology-heavy Orange County California by the Orange County Business Journal.

IMS Press Contact: Harry Gray, vice president sales & marketing [email protected]. During the Expo, please see us in Hall B6, at Booth 6B15.