Jet CEO Wolfgang Prock-Schauer in Mumbai on Monday. (AFP)

Mumbai, Sept. 4: The battle for the skies is turning into a rivetting soap opera — literally.

Taking a leaf out of Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines, Jet Airways — the country’s largest airline with a market share of 35 per cent — today announced plans to launch in-flight entertainment on its domestic flights to blunt an edge that the red-liveried rival has carved for itself.

Jet promises to offer a better fare with 100 hours of video content, eight audio channels and 70 audio CDs to Kingfisher’s five video channels on Fun TV and 10 audio channels on Kingfisher Radio. But Mallya is readying to up the ante with plans to launch live video services on all in-flight screens by the end of this year.

“We are the first airlines in the country to introduce in-flight entertainment services on all our flights. We have raised the bar and redefined the way Indian air travellers perceived flying,” said Girish Shah, head of marketing, Kingfisher Airlines.

Jet Airways, however, will launch its new experience on 10 new Boeing 737-800 over the next 12 months, of which it has taken the delivery of one aircraft at Seattle on August 31.

The airlines will deploy this aircraft initially on three domestic sectors of Mumbai-Hyderabad-Mumbai, Mumbai-Bangalore-Mumbai and Mumbai-Delhi-Mumbai from September 7.

With the 10 new aircraft, we shall be able to cover the major routes over the next one year as it will represent one-third of our fleet. We will gradually convert our fleet to provide these services on all our flights,” said Wolfgang Prock-Schauer, chief executive officer of Jet Airways.

The aircraft, with state-of-the-art Panasonic eFX system, has nine inch video monitors mounted with touch screens in business class and a seven inch touch screen monitor at the back of every seat in economy class. Each aircraft has 24 seats in Club Premiere and 126 seats in economy class.

“Every airlines is extremely careful before incorporating such systems as it increases the fuel consumption. The new aircraft, which are made of composite material are lighter and thus more energy efficient. The individual LCD screens are currently the biggest in the Indian skies,” said Gaurang Shetty, vice president (marketing), Jet Airways.

Jet’s Sky Screen programme includes popular Hollywood and Bollywood shows, including lifestyle and comedy to drama, fashion, showbiz, travel, food, nature and wild life. It offers a business and sports section and has a dedicated children’s programming. Travellers will get to choose from sitcoms like I love Raymond, Friends and the old television classic I Love Lucy.

Kingfisher, in its turn, offers video choices ranging from sports to fashion to an exclusive channel for kids. Similarly the audio channels range from Ghazals and hip- hop to rock music. While the fare of Jet Airways seem more varied, the drawback is that the airlines will update its contents once in two months.

“Our content is highly entertaining and in order to provide a wide range of programmes, we update our content twice every week. Apart from that, we also rotate the channels we partner with regularly so that we can provide a wide range of programmes,” said Shah.