General Motors offers ‘in-flight movies’ for cars with WarnerMedia RIDE streaming service
Road trips just got a little bit easier, with General Motors partnering with a media company to deliver films and TV.
Cross country road trips in the US have been upgraded to Business Class with the announcement of a collaboration between General Motors, WarnerMedia and telecommunications provider AT&T.
The service, called WarnerMedia Ride, allows owners of GM-brand vehicles (Chevrolet, GMC, Buick and Cadillac) to stream on-demand entertainment via the car’s WiFi hotspot and an unlimited-data AT&T 4G plan.
This means the crew in the back can stay glued to their phones or tablets, and not overrun your regular mobile-phone data plan.
Users access the content via an Apple or Android app, and have a choice of live news and sport as well as American cable-channels like CNN, TNT, Boomerang and the Cartoon Network.
WarnerMedia note that there is already a subscriber base of over one-million GM customers currently using the AT&T ‘Connected Car’ data services, and plan to expand the offering to other car brands which support the in-car mobile hotspot service.
With one-hour of HD streaming video taking up about 5GB of data, a standard 30GB monthly data plan would be eroded within six hours. Halve that if you have two passengers viewing different content. The AT&T mobile hotspot service is offered for US$20 on top of any existing unlimited data plan.
Sadly there are no unlimited data plans available in Australia to support such a service locally, but if a long-distance tour is something on your family hotlist once interstate travel restrictions ease, we’ll soon be looking at some of the mobile-broadband options available to help you choose the best one.
In the meantime, Spotto is still our low-bandwidth choice for mobile entertainment.
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