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A comment on How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film. Parent comment

Re:How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film by dasil003 on Thursday October 08, 2015 @03:35PM (#10355478)
In short, yes. Language/subtitle licensing is a mine field. Often times the small local distributors we deal with don't acquire anything but the local language rights, so it becomes almost impossible to go upstream and get the remaining rights even though we may well have the assets for use in other countries.

We are doing what we can to move the ball forward on this issue industry-wide, but historical rights arrangements are working against us here.

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Re:How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film by crucialfelix on Thursday October 08, 2015 @04:52PM (#10356117)
This is also our major issue with MUBI. We love the film selection, but we live in Germany. When we want to watch a French film, its overdubbed in German.

Netflix is also odd about this but usually we can get German subtitles for any film and choose the audio with original language. Ideally we should be able to select any language that there are available subtitles for. Why restrict it by region ?

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Re:How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film by NolF on Thursday October 08, 2015 @06:46PM (#10356910)
The producers likely have distribution agreements on a by-country basis. So, for example WB cannot distribute <movie> in Germany because GEMA has the rights. But GEMA didn't buy the rights for the English subtitles. I imagine technically WB could then sell subtitles rights for <movie> in Germany but it would be a pain because maybe those subtitles were done by <subcompany> for licence in America and Oceania... etc.
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Re:How a small streaming site became the Netflix for indie film by crucialfelix on Friday October 09, 2015 @04:20AM (#10358758)
GEMA is a collection society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights. Equivalent to BMI / ASCAP. They have nothing to do with films.

They certainly do not buy rights for anything at all. They represent copyright holders and collect fees and distribute them.

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