[tendersej]

Maybe someone with experience in the field and more up to date info will correct me, but I did some research on the subject 10 years ago while entertaining the idea to launch a VOD service in France, and the right holders expected that such a service would:

- pay them a percentage of the price of the rental, which could not go below a certain amount,

- pay a yearly license (~3500€/year just for my country for a popular movie) per language audio track,

- handle on their own sending technicians to rip the masters to then host them on the platform.

I don’t exactly remember the minimum price per rental, but the economics didn’t make sense in terms of what we wanted to attempt, so we gave up. One would have to pay an enormous amount in upfront license costs without being able to generate a big volume of views by undercutting the competition in the case where technical excellence could allow us to cut prices.

[interestica]

> per language audio track

I guess this explains why Netflix will have different audio options for the same movie dependent on region.

[AnssiH]

Partially. The other reason is simply to remove clutter in UI.

You can get more tracks to appear if you change Netflix UI language in settings, as described here in 2015 by Netflix CPO: https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...

This is also mentioned in various Netflix help pages, like here, which says 5-7 subtitle languages are shown by default, and you need to change UI language to see the rest: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245