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patrickaljord parent
I was paying for Netflix 10 years ago in France for a short while, wanted some English subtitles for my wife for some US shows but there were only subtitles in French so had to download the same show elsewhere if you know what I'm saying... with English subtitles readily available. I also remember watching some shows like the first two seasons but then only to find out the third season was licensed by another streaming service lol. Such a UX disaster for paying customers.
interestica
I was living in the only english-speaking country in South America. Netflix wouldn't give me French subtitles or secondary audio because apparently south america=spanish for their divisions. I don't see how subtitles would fall under the broader licensing agreements. The subs/langs were available for the same titles in Canada.

(More absurd because France is a part of South America via French Guiana).

Symbiote
This is a common issue across Europe. 40 million+ internal migrants (from one EU country to another), yet most shows on Netflix only have the local language for subtitles and often no option to avoid dubbing.

It's worse than when we bought everything on DVD. Region 2 discs (Europe) would have many soundtracks and many subtitles languages on the disc.

goosedragons
They do. Somebody had to produce the dubs/subs and it wasn't necessarily the content creator especially if it wasn't the language it was originally created in. Those French subs or dubs could have easily been created by a Canadian firm who got the Canadian rights and wanted to use it in French Canada, then that got licensed off to Netflix. It may have had little involvement with the original creator and they don't necessarily hold all the rights over the translation effort to spread it worldwide.

What's more absurd is when you can't get CC for the same language as the show.

interestica
> They do.

Fair enough. But absence of french options for ALL TITLES in that region pointed to a blanket decision.

jiggawatts
I go on this rant regularly, and apparently Netflix staff never visit Hacker News, or just don't care.

Interestingly, it took quite a bit of dev effort to make their subtitles this bad. They had to figure out which subset of languages to show in each region, for example.

I'm sure these decisions are made by the same team that refuses to show English subtitles, and instead always uses English for the hearing impaired. Because why would any human not be able to understand English unless they're deaf, right? Also... no French people are deaf. Everyone knows that.

offices
By not hiring junior devs, they're missing out on a large chunk of those of us who spend their workday raging at technology on HN.
jiggawatts
You might be saying this in jest, but it’s true. Or more accurately, they may have junior devs, but they’re not listened to.

I see this effect regularly at $dayjob where the senior decision makers are too busy to waste time in forums like this… so they don’t get to find out what the entire industry seems to know.

E.g.: they keep choosing Angular for “cold blooded” apps, the type the government develops under a tender that then sits there unmaintained for a decade. Meanwhile Angular has one of the highest rates of churn of any large codebase and takes continuous sustained maintenance to keep up with.

sireat
Same problem with Netflix absolutely no local subtitles/dubs available.

Meanwhile one local streamer telecom has regional content + Disney for 7 Euros a month with dubs/subs.

Another local telecom streamer has regional content + HBO with subs/dubs for 6 Euros a month.

Not sure how they got HBO and Disney so cheap but these are multi-country regional streamers - half government / Scandinavian owned.

So Netflix had to go.

offices
>I also remember watching some shows like the first two seasons but then only to find out the third season was licensed by another streaming service lol.

Fun!

https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

secretsatan
This has also bugged me, they must have access to every language, yet they just don't. I'm sure it's licensing issues.

At least normally they have have the original audio versions, but just recently I saw that in Switzerland, they released Suicide squad but the german dubbed version only, why??

izacus
> "I'm sure it's licensing issues."

I find this term so funny because it kinda makes the problem sound like a physics problem given down from some deity. When it's just the content provider choosing to screw you over by writing a contract that includes regional exclusivity.

Especially when these same companies managed just fine when they put all languages on a DVD disc.

wkat4242
Same here. I still have Amazon prime here in Spain but a lot of content only has the stupid Spanish dubbed audio. And my Spanish isn't that great.

I mostly pirate everything and I have Amazon prime for the shipping so I don't really care but I would really be pissed if I'd paid top dollar.

realusername
I'm also pirating everything for my wife because of the subtitles. She's not a native French speaker and the French subtitles MUST align with the voice to help her which is never the case with Netflix.

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