The fastgrowing in-flight entertainment business, which one industry analyst has estimated will be worth about US$1.7 billion this year, has changed dramatically in only a few years.

Passengers on long commercial flights are no longer limited to listening to a few music channels, monitoring the talk between the pilots and air traffic control or watching an out-of-date movie selected by the crew.

Today, video and audio on demand is fairly common on most long-haul flights. Passengers can select the movies they want to watch, and more importantly, when they want to watch them.

But much more is on the way.

With the introduction this year and next of jetliners such as the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the flying public will have many new possibilities to be entertained on a flight, from playing 3D games to interacting with the flight display map.

It will even be possible using the latest in-flight entertainment system developed by Thales to strike up a conversation in a chat room with another passenger, or passengers.

"We have made it a better overall passenger experience on the airplane," said Alan Pellegrini, vice president and general manager of in-flight entertainment for Thales, the French electronics and defense giant that has been gaining market share over longtime IFE player Panasonic Avionics Corp. of Japan.

A Thales IFE system will be on the first A380 that is delivered to Singapore Airlines in October. And a similar system will be on some 787s, which will enter airline service next year.

Boeing is offering airlines a choice of the Panasonic or Thales in-flight entertainment systems for the 787. Only a small number of the nearly 50 airlines that have ordered more than 650 Dreamliners have so far selected an IFE system. Of those that have, about 75 percent have picked the Thales system, Pellegrini said. They include four Chinese airlines -- Air China, Hainan Airlines, Shanghai Airlines and China Eastern.

Japan Airlines also picked Thales, while All Nippon Airways of Japan, which will take delivery of the first 787s next May, went with Panasonic.

Recently, Pellegrini and other Thales executives provided briefings to a group of U.S. and European reporters about the company. The reporters also received tours of Thales facilities in Seattle and Irvine, Calif. Thales is growing its business at both locations as well as at several other U.S. sites.

The Thales in-flight entertainment business is headquartered in Irvine, where the company has more than 900 employees. About 160 employees work at the Thales high-tech support facility in Seattle.

Opened last September, the Thales facility in Seattle is in a former Boeing building near the south end of Boeing Field not far from Boeing's commercial airplanes headquarters. Thales does avionics repairs at the Seattle facility. It is also a research and development center for the next generation of avionics systems.

Although Thales is well known in the avionics and defense business, it is relatively new to in-flight entertainment. It bought the IFE business of B/E Aerospace in the late 1990s. From only about 3 percent of the IFE market with that acquisition, Thales has grown to challenge Panasonic. It now has about 40 percent of the IFE market.

The hot-selling Dreamliner could be its ticket to getting above the 50 percent market share. The 787 is the fastest-selling jetliner ever developed by Boeing or Airbus.

After it delivers 112 planes in 2008 and 2009, Boeing is expected to boost production of the 787 to anywhere from 11 to 15 planes a month by 2010. That could mean a lot of revenue for Thales. Japan Airlines alone, for example, has ordered 35 Dreamliners.

The list price of the Thales in-flight entertainment system for the 787 runs around US$3 million to US$4 million a plane. About 2,040 separate IFE items must be installed on each 787, said Sergio Von Borries, vice president of Boeing business development for Thales.

Initially, Boeing wanted a wireless in-flight entertainment system for the 787. But that approach was abandoned in favor of a wired system earlier this year.

Boeing said there were too many program risks to have the wireless system ready by next May, when deliveries of the 787 are supposed to begin.

Borries said Thales had always designed its IFE system for the 787 to be either wired or wireless, so the change did not affect the product. He said Thales has not abandoned the wireless approach, but it will be up to Boeing to decide when a wireless IFE system is ready to go on the 787.

Thales has greatly improved the reliability of the IFE systems that are going on the A380, the 787 and which are already being used on some other planes, Borries and Pellegrini said.

"The key message to 787 customers is that the technology is being proven on other airplane programs today and is being modified and upgraded for the 787," Pellegrini said. "It is relatively low risk but at the same time state of the art."