So on Monday I flew from SFO-ICN on UA 893 aboard N121UA and the personal device entertainment was live albeit it is currently in "beta." I don't know if they are testing this on any of the other 744's, but this one is the one with the Star Alliance livery. During the preflight announcements the purser announced the new feature was on this plane. As you can see below I tried this out using an iPad. Apparently per the instructions on the screen it is not yet compatible with Android devices. Also if you guys notice the fine print, this feature is currently complimentary as it is being sponsored by the Mileage Plus Explorer Card.

So how did it work on a transpac. I watched a couple movies and I must say that the service was pretty good considering this is still in beta. During the first movie I watched it looked like the connection was lost during a couple instances in which case i got a spinning wheel. Once the system reconnected the movie more or less started up right where it left off. The video was sharp and the audio was properly synced.

During the second movie there were a couple drops but like during the first movie it picked up right where it left off. I did experience where the movie quit entirely and started back up from the beginning. I will admit that I was able to quickly scrub back to approximately where I left off.

So what are the negatives? Basically to be be able to access the entertainment you need to be able to access the wifi portal page. While we were passing south of the Aleutian Islands I was unable to access the wifi portal hence couldn't access the personal device entertainment options. From what I could tell the wifi was still connected as I was still able to use the united mobile app and get flight updates for other random flights. As for the selection I really think is an improvement over the current IFE. There were about 160 movie titles if I recall correctly. One of my pet peeves about the current IFE especially on the tv episodes is that they literally have one episode loaded of a specific show so on a 30 minute tv show you have like 22 minutes of airtime which isn't much when you're on a 13+ hour flight. With the streaming entertainment I noticed multiple episodes of tv series which is an improvement although I think it still fall shorts of many of the foreign carriers like CX and SQ where I have been able to watch an entire season of specific shows. UA still has room for improvement though as some categories (sports and lifestyle) only had 1 show in each category.

This is definitely a nice start from what I can see from the beta. Hopefully UA can improve on this beta and not run into any licensing issues like they are currently having with the audio selection which is practically non-existent at the moment. I know things have been pretty bleak here on this forum especially with all the Mileage Plus "enhancements," but maybe this is a bright spot. Hopefully it's not too late.