To be fair this has gotten somewhat better, at least with TV series and newer releases on Amazon. Newer shows releasing with proper audio quality, language choice and often even CC subtitles in both languages.

I was pleasantly surprised that my Prime subscription might actually still be useful for something.

But most Germans don't care for the english track in the first place, being used to subbed dialogue.

There are a lot of immigrants, like me, who can speak and understand German but miss a lot when watching movies.

Subtitles would help a lot but even that is missing with a lot of providers (I wonder what people with hearing disabilities do).

At least Netflix has always German subtitles. For series, English subtitles too most of the time, but practically none of the movies have those in English which I find quite weird.

But there is no technical reason not to include other languages in 5.1? I would get the argument for DVDs and maybe live TV, but not for streaming...

It's changing. I'm seeing movies in English a lot more often in cinemas than I did 10 years ago.

Are you saying it isn't ridiculous? It's always ridiculous to not have the original language track in the best quality/format. It would be ridiculous for Japanese films distributed in the US to have the Japanese track in 2.0 and the dubbed English in 5.1

> It would be ridiculous for Japanese films distributed in the US to have the Japanese track in 2.0 and the dubbed English in 5.1

A far worse offender, for me at least, are Blu-Rays in that regard. During their introduction, they were hailed as allowing distributors to pack dozens of high-quality different language tracks and different subtitle options on the disc.

While the reality these days looks like this: Most Blu-Ray releases are still regionalized, very often with limited audio language options (in 2.0 quality) and sometimes not even subtitle support for one language.

I think a lot of that has to do with distributors pretty much forming cartels by region, thus having only rights to distribute only specific versions in specific regions.