Back in college, I was a self-proclaimed “bus person.” If I could take the bus and save a buck, I was all over it. Because of that, I got very acquainted with the buses plying the Boston – New York City route: Greyhound, Boltbus, and Megabus to name a few. Now that I’m more of an Amtrak devotee, I rarely take the bus, but that doesn’t mean I ignore them! I was pleasantly surprised to see Megabus adding amenities to their buses.
Megabus In-Bus Entertainment
Much like Southwest or American, Megabus is going the BYOE (Bring Your Own Entertainment) route. Before traveling, you can download the Megabus RIDE app. Per Megabus:
Travelers can use this interactive and user-friendly solution on their own smartphone, tablet or laptop by connecting their device of choice to a secure local network. On mobile devices and tablets, customers can download the Megabus RIDE app to access the vast library of current entertainment options.
Image courtesy of Megabus
According to The Points Guy, “will have the option to stream from 30 choices of movies, 10 hours of TV shows, 50 audiobooks and music albums and five games. The content is streamed over the buses’ Wi-Fi and will change periodically throughout the year on a rolling basis.” As it stands, you should have access to a wide range of media, including new release movies.
Additionally, the app will allow Megabus to solicit feedback from travelers at the end of a trip, providing valuable information to the company on where they are excelling and where they need to improve.
Megabus plans to complete the rollout of this product onboard it’s entire fleet by the end of November 2017. I’m always excited to see companies adding amenities rather than take them away. My only concern is if everyone onboard (81 people) are trying to use the service, will it be rendered useless?
Have you used this service? How was the speed and ease of use? Let us know below!
Header image courtesy of Megabus
(h/t The Points Guy)
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Network engineer here.
Regarding the usability of serving videos through WiFi in a crowded bus, a high-grade access point with 3×3 MIMO or even 2×2 MIMO can certainly handle over a hundred users streaming HD at a few megabits per second. They only cost a few hundred dollars these days so it’s quite doable.
Internet access via satellite will still be bottlenecked so it won’t be possible for dozens of people to stream youtube at once, but if the movies are served from an on-bus server there’s no such limitation.
The problem will most likely be software; like any newly rolled out system I anticipate there will be crashes, freezes, and slow-downs due to buggy software over time that require system reboots.