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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 lice

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".

cyborgx7 7y ago
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.
usrusr 7y ago
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.
huhtenberg 7y ago
Do elaborate on said hoops.
AnssiH 7y ago
> you just need to jump through undocumented hoops to get it The hoops are documented: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245 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.

cyborgx7 7y ago

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.

usrusr 7y ago

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.

huhtenberg 7y ago

Do elaborate on said hoops.

AnssiH 7y ago

> you just need to jump through undocumented hoops to get it The hoops are documented: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245 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.