Anuvu is what happens when a bunch of private equity guys realize that “inflight entertainment” isn’t really a growth industry but still try to dress it up as a space-adjacent play. Formerly Global Eagle, Anuvu is the Frankenstein cobbled together from bankrupt satellite capacity contracts, airline content libraries, and whatever connectivity dreams could be resold to airlines desperate to keep passengers from screaming on long-haul flights.

The company positions itself as a connectivity and content provider for aviation and maritime, but in practice it’s stuck in the awkward middle. It doesn’t own spectrum, satellites, or serious infrastructure, so it’s perpetually at the mercy of wholesale capacity from SES, Intelsat, and whoever else will cut them a volume discount. That means their margins look like a European airline’s balance sheet in February: thin, ugly, and full of excuses.

Their “differentiator” is supposed to be flexibility: leasing capacity opportunistically, stitching together a patchwork of GEO, HTS, and now nodding aggressively at LEO because customers want to hear it. They’ve talked about being “satellite-agnostic,” which is just a polite way of saying “we’ll buy whatever’s cheapest that week.” To investors, that sounds like nimbleness; to anyone who’s actually run a network, it sounds like a customer service nightmare.

Anuvu’s other card is content, movies, shows, games packaged for airline and cruise ship passengers, which feels about as strategic as Blockbuster trying to compete with Netflix by installing more couches in their stores. Airlines increasingly just want bandwidth and let passengers stream their own entertainment. Meanwhile, the cruise market is brutal on bandwidth pricing and loyalty: Royal Caribbean isn’t going to bet its fleet on Anuvu when SpaceX is dangling Starlink Maritime in front of them at lower latency and lower costs.

So the company survives by being small enough to duck under the radar of the giants, but not small enough to escape the fact that its business model depends on other people’s satellites and other people’s content. They’ll keep selling the “end-to-end managed service” story, but the real narrative is simpler: Anuvu is a middleman, one with a private-equity clock ticking loudly in the background.