> Netflix, a Californian company, simply couldn't fathom that some people might understand English and Spanish.

Or they just decided the path that serves the most people without complicating matters is to assume you want subtitles for any language not selected as the primary audio language.

I think the relevant question here is how would you design a control panel that allowed you to define which of the many languages which might be in the movie should be subtitled or not? I think the people that care about this (that is, those that speak both languages and find it annoying) is vanishingly small.

I don't agree that adding Off/Auto/Language-of-choice setting is complicating matters. Having an "Off" setting that isn't actually off is not good UX. A huge portion of Spanish speakers in the US also speak English, so I wouldn't say this is a niche feature.

44% of Californians speak a language other than English at home, and 1/5 nationwide [1], yet Netflix' product doesn't seem to cater particularly well to those audiences.

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/censu...

Yes, exactly. Netflix is militantly opposed to feature bloat. That means picking the case that works well for most people.

And I'd add that what to subtitle is an artistic choice; directors carefully decide what languages to use and what they want to subtitle or leave untranslated. Plus Netflix have to deal with source material from hundreds of companies. Creating clever subtitle features quickly gets out into very deep waters.

> That means picking the case that works well for most people.

On the web, you can serve customized content to every single client, because the tech enables it. It's just wrong to go for "one size fits all".

In the app settings you have a list of languages and the user selects the ones they speak. When CC is on subtitle everything, when CC is off subtitle what is not selected.

Yes, that's probably the right way to implement this, but it is still more complex.

No one on this site will have problem with that UI, but I personally know people who have issues with much simpler things.

Sane defaults are easy to set in this scenario so the average user gets the same behavior as today but those people who want more control can still do so.

Add an English and Spanish audio language.

It's really not hard. The real problem is that because it's closed-source software, the user must rely on the creator to think of every edge case.

It would be so much better if the user could just watch the encrypted video feed in just any player they want (provided they interface with a libnetflix library...)

Absolutely.

The only reason I have left to pirate a movie that is available to me on netflix is to get more stable playback, the ability to play slightly faster, and the ability to use Smooth Video Project.

It's obvious that DRM-based platforms have driven TV manufacturers to implement expensive frame-interpolation into their displays, when it can be done much more efficiently at the decoder level, on machines where it makes sense to already have a fast GPU. This is the thing I find most frustrating with this situation.

If the show or movie has both Spanish and English subtitles, when you go to turn subtitles on/off just show each language with its own toggle. There could also be master toggle to show turn all on/off. I doubt most shows would have more than two, if at all.

That’s a far far saner interpretation of “off” than the alternative

On hbo Nordic, (The Scandinavian hbo go) off means -OFF- and it’s absolutely infuriatingly stupid to expect that I can speak Spanish, or Russian, just because I don’t want Scandinavian subtitles when watching an English movie

I feel like English-speaking product design in general has not caught up with the idea that there is a substantial audience of very competent second language speakers. Most educated Continentals I know have similar complaints.

To help out: in the most of Hollywood movies spoken Russian is usually beyond unnatural with a heavy accent... to a point computer synthesized voice acting would be an improvement.

Do the same thing happen in Russia when they feature spoken English?

(Likely) it used to in the 80s when I was exposed to Russian movies but nowadays I cannot judge due to lack of exposure. (Russian is my 3rd language.)

Heh, that's actually funny. I'll be that is a technology issue and not a rights issue. The again, how do you indicate that you understand both languages? For a standard movie, the "foreign" language is always subtitled (unless the director specifically sats not to), even with subs off.

But that's the same for BluRay and DVDs. It's just a limited use case and probably just difficult to program for.

edit: never-mind I responded to the wrong post

You'd need more "settings" too because some people want only foreign language subtitles turned on (language impaired) and others want subtitles for everything (hearing impaired). And what if you're multi-lingual but hearing impaired? You might want all subtitles for languages you speak in the original language.

Perhaps they can fathom it, but the percent of the audience that is spanish/english bilingual and cares about subtitles was too small for them to care about.

Burned in subtitles maybe?