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by interestica 871 days ago
I was living in the only english-speaking country in South America. Netflix wouldn't give me French subtitles or secondary audio because apparently south america=spanish for their divisions. I don't see how subtitles would fall under the broader licensing agreements. The subs/langs were available for the same titles in Canada.

(More absurd because France is a part of South America via French Guiana).

2 comments

This is a common issue across Europe. 40 million+ internal migrants (from one EU country to another), yet most shows on Netflix only have the local language for subtitles and often no option to avoid dubbing.

It's worse than when we bought everything on DVD. Region 2 discs (Europe) would have many soundtracks and many subtitles languages on the disc.

They do. Somebody had to produce the dubs/subs and it wasn't necessarily the content creator especially if it wasn't the language it was originally created in. Those French subs or dubs could have easily been created by a Canadian firm who got the Canadian rights and wanted to use it in French Canada, then that got licensed off to Netflix. It may have had little involvement with the original creator and they don't necessarily hold all the rights over the translation effort to spread it worldwide.

What's more absurd is when you can't get CC for the same language as the show.

> They do.

Fair enough. But absence of french options for ALL TITLES in that region pointed to a blanket decision.