Originally Posted by FlyWorld

On United Continental aircraft, there is no "off" button.

The procedure to become free from the endless cycle of advertising is to "turn the brightness down all the way" and the button press counts that I shared (more than 100 button presses per round trip journey) are what it takes to get the brightness low enough that the screen becomes black. Until, they turn it back on again, and force you to repeat that process again.

It's become so tedious and frustrating that I've now found a way to cover the screen with a magazine, which takes less effort than battling the Smisek regime for a modicum of peace for the duration of my flight. This works well on the new ultra painful flier-unfriendly Recaro seats, but doesn't work on the old Continental seats.

Of course, there's nothing I can do about all the endless flickering screens on all the other seats around me. Best solution, as always, is to avoid flying sCO aircraft whenever possible.



It takes a lot longer than 5-6 seconds for me. Primarily, because the device will not accept or register a "brightness down" button press event in close proximity to another button press event. So, not only do I have to press that button more than 100 times per round trip journey, but I also have to wait and pause between each button press to avoid the controls that prevent it from responding to multiple button presses in quick succession. Furthermore, the cheap bubble style buttons are fairly insensitive and even after waiting between each press event to work around the control that they apparently designed to make it impossible to shut that thing off without a lot of time and effort, I still have to keep trying and compensating for the times when the button press event is not registered as a result of the poor quality of the physical hardware.