Comment by jiggawatts
2 years ago
Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles.
They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it!
If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you.
If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.
You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX guy at Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol) guy to figure out the most common languages for each region.
Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those countries. I'm sure they used very clever algorithms on big data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done.
Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever graduates couldn't. So they instructed their call centre staff to lie to their customers.
Then they had someone write this idiocy: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798
"If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do not display on your device, try another device."
Oh, oh, I'll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a phone... and... oh... four languages.
PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are "special" and use eye-searing HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.
A common thing where I live is for local companies to buy streaming rights for Netflix-created media, and then we can't watch Netflix-created media on Netflix because local-company bought streaming/playback rights. Netflix doesn't care about the customer. They care about money, and that won't change. They'll max out the bullshit until customers push back, leave it there for a bit, wait for customers to get used to the new-bullshit, then add more bullshit and repeat.
> Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out
Did they? Both Prime Video and Disney+ have very very narrow subtitle and audio language choices.
> If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.
Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
As someone who speaks multiple languages, and has the habit of watching with subtitles in the original language of the content if I speak it; otherwise default to English subtitles with original audio... none of the streaming companies have managed to handle that properly. Way too often the audio is only dubbed (often badly), or only my subtitles in my local language (French) are available, regardless of the original language of the content. I'd rather watch British movies with subtitles in English, not French, thank you very much.
Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly.
Are you saying it's some sort of challenge beyond the abilities of a Senior Technical Lead with total comp in the seven digits to figure out how to make a list of items more than 4 or 5 entries long? Too many megabytes of JSON to shove down the wire for more?
> Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire translations work. You pay someone to translate your shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No weird region-locked silliness.
You can make other languages appear by changing the entire UI language of Netflix, which then shows some other "data driven" subset of the subtitle languages.
But then, the entire UI is in another language, which not everyone watching may understand.
Essentially there are audio-subtitle language combinations that are impossible to achieve, no matter what. That combo may not be common enough to make any top-5 list anywhere.
So if you love someone of a sufficiently small minority, or have an unusual racial makeup in your household, Netflix would rather you weren't so weird.
Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They wrote the code to do this.
Blows my mind.
> Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love
I'm on the same boat and I hear you. And since we are on this subject, do you know what else grinds my gears? The whole idea of cultural appropriation. So if your ancestry is X then you can't do/wear/celebrate Y.
So when you ask these people something like: Is it okay for my half-X, half-Y children to do this? they start feeling confused. But if you go: What about my grandchildren, who are 1/4 X and 1/4 Y and 1/2 Z?. Some of them begin to realize how racist and simplistic they are being.
Learn and enjoy other people's cultures, for goodness' sake. It's called being human.
4 replies →
> They definitely do not. That's not how work-for-hire translations work. You pay someone to translate your shows' subtitles for you, then you own the copyright on that work that you paid for. That's how that works. No weird region-locked silliness.
If you skip the fact that Netflix do regional deals with local content houses to sell Netflix-made stuff either in theatres or get TV releases, in which case translations could be a part of the deal to be be provided by the local entity who's getting the rights; or the other, more common scenario, where Netflix acquire local content for wider publication (e.g. Casa de Papel/Money Heist is a very popular example), where again, there might be complications.
> Apple TV shows something like 50 languages. More than I can be bothered to count, certainly.
I haven't found that to be the case, but had Apple TV only briefly because of the general poor quality (watched 3 series on it, all three devolved into trope after trope barely going below the obvious surface).
> Sit down and think about how absurd it is for the bastion of wokeness that is Netflix to discriminate this profoundly against inter-racial love. On purpose. They wrote the code to do this.
Is woke in the room with us right now? Can you point it out and explain what it is? For the record, "races" are a stupid social construct that should have died out with the Nazis. And people can be of different ethnicities while speaking the same language(s), or inversely of the same ethnicity while speaking different languages. Being "woke", "inter-racial" and different languages are completely orthogonal topics.
I have to add two adjacent subtitle-related stupidities on Netflix:
1. Closed captions (CC). Okay, I'm willing to accept they improve the experience of a show / movie for a non-zero number of people. What I absolutely don't accept is CC being the ONLY VERSION OF ENGLISH SUBTITLES available. Either CC or nothing. I can't be the only one who prefers English subtitles for English-spoken media, while NOT needing every single sound described as [wet squelching] or [quirky synth music].
(Bonus points for everyone who recognizes those specific examples ↑)
2. Subtitles in all-caps. For the entire movie. Just why? If I'm able to read the text in time at all (it is widely known that words and sentences in all-caps are slower to read), then I'll just feel everyone's screaming all the time, even if they aren't. Whose idea was this? And also here, to my knowledge it only affects English. (I believe all Nolan movies got this "treatment" for example.)
There have been several occasions where even though it was readily available for me to stream from Netflix, I pirated a show or movie anyway, specifically to avoid one or both of these issues.
> Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science guy to figure out the most common languages for each region.
Odd they couldn't ask your preferred language(s) in your profile, then include it whenever available with the regional list.
I don't know about browser options, but on the android app I can choose between 7 different audio languages and 29 subtitles. Looked it up just for you with an episode of "The good Doctor", which is not a netflix original. I live in Germany. Definitely not an UI issue.
Seems like they'd want people to, idk pick up to 4 languages themselves in settings if they are really attached to their picker. Which makes more sense to me.
is it still a thing that you have to use Edge on windows to get 4k HDR, but you can't on Chrome?
I love this rant with a passion.