January 19. 2007 – THE only surprise about the new Inflight Entertainment and Communications Conference (iECcon), to be held on February 11-13 in Dubai, is that it has taken this long to make its debut. After all, its coverage area of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia contains in the likes of Emirates, Etihad, Qatar and Singapore Airlines some of the world’s most go-ahead carriers when it comes to IFE and passenger communications.

iECcon was created to help airline executives from the three regions to understand an increasingly complex industry, according to co-ordinator Patrick Brannelly, VP passenger communications and visual services at Emirates. The two-day event is free to airline delegates and a number of carriers are already committed to attend, Brannelly says.

The leading first-day topic will be inflight communications – Emirates is expected soon to become the first carrier in the world to offer an onboard cellphone service. Also to be addressed are entertainment trends in the three regions, how to optimise content for audio/video-on-demand (AVOD) delivery, revenue generation, wireless content loading, and future technologies.

There will also be case studies from India’s Jet Airways, which was recognised by the World Airline Entertainment Association last year for the quality of its IFE, Qatar Airways, the only long-haul carrier in the world to offer live inflight television, and Emirates, talking about its experience with AVOD loading.

On the morning of the second day delegates will be offered a choice between attending the event’s distributor market - face-to-face meetings with regional content distributors – and touring Emirates’ new $350 million state-of-the-art engineering technical centre. The final afternoon will be devoted to technical workshops.

Go to www.ieccon.com for fuller details of iECcon 2007