No, it is simply to avoid clutter in UI:

https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...

> There are too many languages to list them all in the menu and have the one you want be easily selected - especially when you are viewing on a TV with only a left-right-up-down remote. Accordingly, we show the commonly used languages in any country.

Well that's the first time I've legitimately gotten upset at a UX decision in a long, long time. My wife is homesick, 5000 miles from her country and can't watch anything in her language... Because they couldn't be bothered with an advanced settings UI anywhere? Seriously, Netflix?

Maybe that's an entitled attitude, but to me it's in the same ballpark as accessibility. It might not make a difference to 99% of users, but to the 1% of users in the long tail, it's royally screwing them for lack of a relatively small amount of effort. (In this scenario, a tiny amount of effort).

As someone said above, she should try to change the language of the interface to her language.

In my experience, that’s not a solution. I always use Netflix in English, but frequently encounter US content with only regional subtitles and no English track.

So set the UI language to watch she wants it to be? This is what profiles are for.

Prime video shows all subtitles. Even if we assume it is licensing, then Netflix's own shows should show more subtitles, but they just don't. I think they see showing tons of subtitle languages being shown as an UX issue.

So form over function then?

That’s also a form of UX fail.

It's available, you just need to jump through undocumented hoops to get it. I know not to underrate the media industry on this stuff, but I doubt they have licensing that says "make available but only through shitty UX".

But "hide from the UI" might be sufficient to pass legal review for a "make only available to users of language x, y and z" clause.

I could easily imagine this happening if they have two separate layers of availability checks. One general authentication check (likely with coarse "DVD region" baked in) owned by one suborg and another to handle all the eccentric subtleties of hundreds of different licensors owned by a different suborg. As laughable as "security by hiding the UI" is, when it's only protecting licensing nuances that have traditionally only been enforced by broadcast range (which is roughly continental for satellite) pressure to fix it can be very, very low.

Licensing might have given the impetus for the gating. And then the implementation is made like this, either as an oversight, or to provide plausible deniability to Netflix.

Here in Germany violence in video games used to be heavily censored. Much less so now, but when I was growing up, you basically couldn't have blood in games. I remember playing a GTA game that had bleeding NPCs or not, depending on whether you selected German or English as the game language.

> you just need to jump through undocumented hoops to get it

The hoops are documented: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245 ("Change your subtitle language" section)

It says "Due to the large number of languages available, Netflix only displays the 5-7 languages most relevant to you while streaming." and then proceeds to tell the steps to change profile language to get other languages.

Do elaborate on said hoops.

Wouldnt they need to check this based on location, and not on user interface language though?

Please don't do this. I can manage to read enough to do certain workflows, but I get so frustrated when Google presumptuously shows me dates according to the Buddhist calendar just because my IP is in Thailand. If my browser is reporting 'en-US' as the locale, the when available I expect to get that.

But you cannot expect to get unlicensed content, which is what your parent was talking about.

What makes you think everybody in a particular place speaks a particular language?

Shouldn't they just ask the user what their preferred languages are?