Comment by sofixa
2 years ago
> 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.
I consider this to be the answer to "cultural appropraition" which people seem to have made up because their hobby is being offended: https://rumble.com/v3wx1mz-is-this-outfit-offensive-students...
I've seen similar videos with Japanese garb too. The offendatrons hate it. The actual Japanese people love that you're enjoying their culture.
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> 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.