…But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy french cinema or foreign films! I do, very much, but no matter how much I love foreign films I can’t enjoy them without some mother fucking subtitles!
Here’s a suggestion, when you rip your movies into your servers for your customers to view on demand, INCLUDE the subtitles you bastards!
I was looking foward to a nice quite evening of a well crafted cinema complete with murder and incest (Les Blessures Assassines) and now I’m SOL.
Well this is interesting. All this big todo about unlimited on demand, and you’re saying they don’t include English subtitles on the foreign films they make available to US customers?
Hmm, I guess we could consider this French immersion or something…
I agree it’s annoying, but looking at it from their POV, they’re not there to do us any favors; they’re there to try and pump up their business, and if you get frustrated enough to order the DVD by mail, then it’s all to the good from their standpoint. So they’ve really got no motivation to supply us with subtitles.
I get the feeling, from browsing the new Unlimited Instant Viewing catalog for the last couple of days, that it’s kind of a back-of-the-hand deal. They haven’t released any of the good movies, the movies you, like, really wanna see. It’s mostly the “meh” movies, like The World’s Fastest Indian, and literally tons of PBS Nature, and oddball documentaries that I never, ever heard of. So it’s kind of like a clean-out-the-attic rummage sale. Don’t expect anything really choice to appear, because they’re not doing it because they love us, they’re doing it because they want us to spend money in their store.
And since they don’t really love us, no subtitles.
No. If they could make all their movies available for online viewing, they would instantly quadruple their revenues overnight. They can’t do that because the movie industry makes it impossible or expensive. They make LESS money if you get the DVD than if you watch the movie online as long as the licensing fee for showing the movie is not per-showing.
And how do you pump up your business? By doing your customers favors and not pissing them off, maybe?
I don’t know. Seems pretty logical to me. Ripping subs off a DVD takes half a second, and streaming movies is a lot cheaper than paying the postage both to and from customers’ houses.
I read this thread earlier and thought “huh, that sucks. Make a note to not watch subtitled movies on Watch Instantly!”
But then I thought about it, and realized that while I’m not a big French film buff, one of the 9 hours of movies I Watched Instantly last month was - a French film!
And it had subtitles!
So perhaps it was just the one movie you got? FWIW I saw The Beat That My Heart Skipped. It wasn’t very good.
I wonder if the film was hard or soft subbed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just ripping the audio and video tracks, and forgetting that for foreign films the subtitle track is also necessary for most viewers. For a hard subbed film the subtitles are already in the image, so no problem.
Well, the licensing fees can’t be per-showing, because otherwise they’d be losing money big-time. My daughter and I alone have accounted for about 6 instant movies just in the last two days, under our $8.99 a month subscription, which entitles us effectively to about 1 DVD a week. So if Netflix was being charged a per-showing fee, then they’d be losing money on the Goose household, because in effect we got 6 free movies this week from them, and I can’t believe that their business model wouldn’t have predicted that multiple users in the same household would be viewing additional movies under the account’s login. I thus infer that the licensing fee for the newly released freebies is just some kind of flat fee, not a per-showing fee.
The reason that releasing a goodly chunk of their catalog for instant viewing is intended to pump up their business is that they’re going after the holdouts, like my parents. They’ve already got everybody signed up who was going to sign up, and now they’re focusing on the Great Uncommitted. So they do that by saying, “Hey, look, for your $8.99 a month you can get free unlimited instant viewing of over 6,000 titles!” Certain people who wouldn’t sign up to get movies by mail will sign up to get something they perceive as “free”. It’s like the way they bundle a tiny tube of toothpaste with your liter jug of mouthwash–it’s to induce you to buy the mouthwash, because you are pleased at getting “free” toothpaste.
I wouldn’t interpret this as anything particularly callous. Hypothesis: the people who enter the movies into the netflix database worked on the same assumption as the OP, viz. if a French language movie is there it must subtitled. The entry into the database may even be automated.
Every DVD-ripping program I’ve seen includes ripping subtitles by default, with the players able to select which one (if any) to show. My 45 second google search shows that this is an in-browser thing, so unless Kinthalis just needs to hit ‘S’, an entire department at Netflix doesn’t know WTF their job is all about.
I think this must have been an accidental oversight on the part of Netflix, and not a blanket policy. I watched a Hungarian film recently with appropriate subtitles. Also Letters from Iwo Jima, complete with English subtitles.
I don’t think Netflix would try to discourage use of this service at this point. Otherwise why bother investing in the infrastructure to even offer it? As others have pointed out it is probably to their benefit to get people to move over to an online distribution, rather than paying mailing fees all the time. I would think that if they could offer a bigger selection they would, but they are probably not getting a good deal from the content owners.
Having said that, I think accidentally leaving off the subtitles to something I wanted to see is irritating enough to be pit-worthy. Also, my experience yesterday, where I tried to watch Das Boot and all they had was a horrible English-dubbed version, which sounded ridiculous!
Doesn’t a Netflix membership give you unlimited rentals, so that you don’t have to pay for each DVD? Seems like all Netflix would get out of it are higher shipping costs and more pissed-off customers.
You only get “unlimited” as constrained by the limits of the space-time continuum. I’m on the plan where I can have as many as I want, but only one at a time. So this effectively means I get one DVD a week, or 4 a month, because by the time I watch it, mail it back, and get the next one, a week has gone by.
No bueno. I get unlimited rentals, three at a time, at a local video store five miles away for $15/mo and I’ve taken them to the cleaners with some $90 worth of rentals in the 12 days I’ve been with them so far. No Netflix for me, then!