not really. consider ife as a fraction of your ticket price. ife becomes worth more to the passenger in first, less in coach.

If I buy a J ticket, is the IFE worth more to me than if I bought a Z ticket? It's the exact same movies, and it's not the cheaper ticket only gets to use the IFE for a smaller portion of the flight.

The fact that it's frivolous isn't really relevant

Being in a plane is a highly confined situation, and most normal activities used to pass time are precluded.

If I found out that I had stupidly forget to charge my devices 5 hours would be a long time to be "dark". OTOH, I would hardly care about the IFE if I am properly prepared.

At home though, I need neither. Even if I lost all power at my house for 5 hours I could keep busy doing chores.

So yeah, I do understand the OP complaint.

It's been years since I've had non-working IFE on a DL flight, and I don't recall the compensation.
I burned leftover AA miles for business class rt RDU-LHR last fall and got 10,000 miles for problematic IFE. Bunch of movies didn't play beyond the recycling Marriott commercials. The miles came without a request, it was handled by the FA. The ticket was 115,000 AA miles RT; DL would have been 160,000.
Which is a complaint about AA - at least the DL commercial before the films is for Delta. AA shows multiple commercials for Marriott and other outside providers.

if the ife is 5% of your ticket, that would be $5 for a $100 ticket and $50 for a $1000 ticket. so yes, it is worth more based on what you pay.

and of course frequent flyer status shows how much you spend with the airline, and thus how much they want to cater to you.

There’s a device called a book.

I frequently don’t use the IFE on international flights.

Seems more than adequate compensation.

Also DL offers DL studio on all flights with IFE. You could have solved this problem by firing up your phone, laptop, or tablet and just streaming...

the most i ever use ife is to turn on the flight tracker, or turn off the display.

reading a book, listening to my music, or watching content on my tablet is infinitely better than watching whatever crap the airline is being paid to promote.

but that's just begging the question of whether a percentage of your ticket is the correct way to look at it (the fact that the compensation is almost always in a narrow band of 5k-15k should tell you this is wrong)

The fact that you personally don't use it is like the least relevant thing I can think of. Clearly, a LOT of people DO use it.

I frequently don't eat the meals on planes but if someone was denied a meal because (E.g.) the catering was short I wouldn't think they should just move on.

I strongly disagree. F/J are a lot more expensive than a discount Y fare and that should include more service recovery if the experience doesn't match the price. 5500 on a $500 fare versus 5500 on a $5000 fare is 1/10th the compensation.

Are we really such slaves to corporations in this country that when they don't deliver something promised we should suck it up?

Both of you are basing the need for more compensation on the ticket price, not the class of service.

A full fare Y ticket is quite often more than a discount Z ticket on the same flight.

Agent dependent but 5500 seems adequate for IFE. I was offered 3000 for a paid F downgrade before; needless to say I declined that offer.

I don’t use IFE much either, but in marketing and financial reports Delta calls it out as a clear differentiator between themselves and their competitors, and in aggregate Delta charges a bit more for tickets than their competitors. So yes, a dysfunctional system is a service failure on their part that they should provide compensation for.