The service, the first of its kind, will initially be available on some aircraft operated by Continental Airlines. Passengers will be able to watch over a hundred channels provided by DirecTV satellite television.
LiveTV, which is owned by JetBlue, provides inflight entertainment for JetBlue, Continental, Frontier, AirTran, Alitalia, Virgin Blue, WestJet, Azul and other airlines. The company has said that introducing closed captions, which each passenger can choose to turn on or off, is part of its goal of creating an ‘At Home in the Air’ experience for air travellers.
“This is a great development,” said Chris Mikul, Project Manager at Media Access Australia. “It shows that with a bit of will and effort, anything can be captioned.”
In Australia, the only captioned programs available on aircraft are the news bulletins produced by the Nine Network which are shown with open captions on Qantas flights.
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