Why can't I skip on-plane announcements on the IFE, in langauges I don't speak?

Recently I was flying on a middle-eastern airline, which offered "gate-to-gate" in-flight entertainment (IFE). I started watching a film shortly after getting to my seat. Once everyone was on board, the IFE was paused to show quite a lengthy and stylised Safety Briefing Video in English. All fine and as expected, no complaints there!

Once that had finished, about 30 seconds later they paused the IFE again, and re-showed the lengthy video in Arabic. Being a middle-eastern airline, that does make sense for their local customers! Personally though, I don't speak or read any Arabic, so I didn't gain anything from it... However, I couldn't seem to skip it either.

When an announcement / video / etc is shown in multiple times in multiple languages, what's the reason why the Aircraft IFE won't let you skip subsequent languages that you don't speak/understand?

Best Answer

In an ideal world, the company would know your primary language and only show it on the IFE once you are at your seat.

The issues are the following :

while the airline could guess your primary language, there could always be exceptions and mistakes when you guess rather than you ask. And then for privacy protection reason, some people might not want to have this information stored on the company servers.
these are security details and the company is forced by law to show them to the passengers. I am not 100% sure but I think they have to show it in the company default language, also probably in English and the end destination target language.
when it comes to security, you'd better be on the safe side and tell things twice rather than once or none. So they prefer to be sure that everybody gets it.

People flying frequently perfectly know those security details. Still, they are forced to listen to it. Maybe one day, it will help them, you never know :)