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