By Bill Hoppin, VP of Business Development
Earlier this month I was sitting on a United airlines plane headed to the NRF (National Retail Federation) retail show in New York and I had an awesome experience with an App 
that validates a lot of the stuff we are working on here at Aerohive and our recently announced Personalized Engagement Ecosystem.
The United app, which is still in beta and referred to on United's website as Personal Device Entertainment, uses onboard Wi-Fi to provide access to a library of movies and TV shows that can be streamed to your personal laptop, Apple iOS device or Android device.
Here is how Personal Device Entertainment app works:
- Has a simple home screen that normally gives you “check in” and other choices.
- When you connect to the United SSID (just that, no logging in or authentication) and re-launch the United App: Lo and behold, the home screen has changed.
- Home screen now has an option called “entertainment” and clicking that gets you right into choices for movies etc.
- Choose a movie and watch it start streaming on your device.
Why is this cool?
- It shows a great new use case for Wi-Fi: Streaming entertainment!
- BYOD: For Airplanes that don’t have screens on each seat (this one did not) they are using the screens people already have.
- It shows / validates the concept of an App that “changes personality” when connected to a specific Wi-Fi SSID (just like Endless Aisle does.)
- Leverages Wi-Fi to deliver more than just Internet access.
This is the kind of experience and thinking that I believe validates the vision of Wi-Fi as being more than connectivity, and why - similar to what we did here at Aerohive with our Personalized Engagement Ecosystem - it's meaningful to leverage Wi-Fi networks to deliver Insights & Applications.