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.

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.