Dish Network is offering free TV on Southwest Airlines flights, kicking off the service aboard a Boston-to-Baltimore trip on 1 July that included "the Boston guys" from Dish's Hopper commercials as guests. The satellite TV company is making a group of television channels and on-demand programming available to Southwest travellers on the airline's Wi-Fi-enabled Boeing 737s, which make up about 75 percent of the domestic carrier's fleet. The Wi-Fi service is provided to Southwest by Row 44, enabling fliers to access programming from their mobile devices and tablets. The live channels offered by Dish on Southwest flights are Bravo, CNBC, Fox 5 New York (WNYW), Fox Business Network, Fox News Channel, Golf Channel, MLB.com (Major League Baseball, when games are available), MSNBC, NBC 4 (WNBC) and the NFL Network.
In addition, Dish is offering 12,500 "Rapid Reward" frequent-flier miles on Dallas-based Southwest to airline fliers who sign up for Dish Network's home TV service and giving them an iPad 2 tablet computer. The aim of the promotion is to expose those Southwest customers to Dish's Hopper set-top box and its "TV Anywhere" technology that allows subscribers to access their Dish programming through broadband connections wherever they go, said James Moorhead, chief marketing officer for Dish. Dish is also featured in Southwest's emails, boarding-area multimedia displays, in-flight magazines and talked about by the flight attendants on the Wi-Fi-enabled flights. The promotion will run for an undetermined amount of time.
