Be honest: who ignores those airline safety demonstrations?

Great points.

To your point “so how is it that the safety video IS the hardest thing to get people to pay attention to?”
I agree with you on both counts. It’s a subject we want to ignore. There is an exciting element to travel (or at least there used to be), adrenaline generally runs high and I don’t think we want to “come back down” to the realities of what *could* happen. I also feel that many people, myself included, wonder that if the unthinkable should happen, is there any real point? Of course, there is—the Hudson River landing springs to mind. The other aspect is the repetition that you point out. For those that travel often, the live demo gets tiresome. For flights that have the personal video, that’s a great delivery platform — it’s then up to you if you want to watch or not. Sometimes I drift to sleep and find I missed the demo. I look at the safety sheet out of guilt…don’t tell anyone :)
Going back to those personal video screens that give people choice, it’s still in the interests of the airline to encourage people to watch, so this circles back to the original point about making the video more engaging and entertaining to watch.