Airplanes will soon have Netflix streaming, so take that, downloaded episode of Doctor Who

Since humankind first conquered the skies, achieving the miracle of flight, the same question has echoed through the halls of progress, from the Wright brothers’ garage to the R&D facilities of Lockheed-Martin: Sure, this flying thing is nice, but can’t we stream old Friends episodes while we do it?

At long last, the sybaritic dreams of society are made real, as Engadget reports Netflix is launching a new initiative to get streaming service onboard most commercial airlines by sometime next year. In addition to making you feel pretty stupid for downloading all of season three of Rectify, the company will use its mobile device encoding technology to make the streaming service accessible even without the benefit of rapid satellite internet access. It also allows Netflix to strike yet another blow against its ancient foe, the sky.

While a few carriers already make Netflix available, it’s a rare luxury, thanks in large part to the bandwidth required to stream the increasingly universal 4K HDR image quality of most programming. The new plan is to instead offer “DVD quality,” which, at a mere 250Kbps, is much more capable of providing streaming to a large number of passengers without a costly upgrade to the wifi. The plan also allows using “DVD quality” as a pejorative in order to to deeply confuse your elderly relative, who won’t stop bragging about how good DVDs look compared to those old VHS cassettes.

The service is expected to begin sometime in early 2018, with you immediately forgetting you even downloaded those seven episodes of Ray Donovan, because really, who’s going to be asking you if you’re all caught up on Ray Donovan anytime soon.