Download Lufthansa’s Streaming Entertainment App Before You Fly

i was surprised to see a new(-to-me) entertainment option on my Lufthansa Frankfurt to London flight this morning — streaming entertainment! the thing about it that is different from what i’m used to on United is that

a) while the content does come over wifi, the plane did NOT have internet. just wifi for content distribution, that’s all. no FlyNet internet service.

b) you need a separate application for your device (if it’s not a laptop) — the Lufthansa app that you use to check in, etc., won’t cut it.

anyways, just a warning to download the separate Lufthansa Entertainment app to your Android or iOS device before you fly. again, it’s not part of the main Lufthansa app, so you’re out of luck if that’s all you have (as was my case). you can also just use a laptop that has the Silverlight plugin, but i didn’t know that until i did the research for this post. *sad panda*

note that this entertainment option is only available on a select few A321 planes, as per the ever-knowing @AirlineFlyer — if you check your flight status before departure on the Lufthansa app, it should notify you, says their information page about this service.

that said, it’s not completely hopeless if you just have a simple browser — you can view a pretty decent map as well as download current newspapers and magazines. the latter option isn’t that great if you can’t read German, though — only a small handful of newspapers and one magazine are in English. the German selection is much wider.

the best thing about this is that the periodical content is downloaded as PDFs, which you can save to your device (i saved mine to iBooks) to read later on, when you don’t have a connection.

here are some screenshots from the service. reading periodicals on your small phone screen isn’t ideal, but it works in a pinch.

the last page is a GQ survey they did asking what type of socks you wear with sneakers. for the record, i’m indeed part of that 62.5% majority (who wears no-show socks with sneakers), but if you ask me, the survey is flawed because everyone knows Europeans love to wear black socks (or funny combo-colored socks) and none of those were response options (the other responses are ‘white’, ‘none’, and ‘i don’t own sneakers’) ;).