Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidovitch | Hacker News Reader

Only discovered MUBI today via HN. Looks great! There is one annoyance (which I also have with Netflix): I live in Denmark, but I am not fluent in Danish. Not all your movies have English subtitles though, so how can I watch anything else except the three languages I master (English, French and Dutch)? Are licensing issues preventing you from offering English subtitles on all your movies as a default?

View on HN

In short, yes. Language/subtitle licensing is a mine field. Often times the small local distributors we deal with don't acquire anything but the local language rights, so it becomes almost impossible to go upstream and get the remaining rights even though we may well have the assets for use in other countries.

We are doing what we can to move the ball forward on this issue industry-wide, but historical rights arrangements are working against us here.

This is also our major issue with MUBI. We love the film selection, but we live in Germany. When we want to watch a French film, its overdubbed in German.

Netflix is also odd about this but usually we can get German subtitles for any film and choose the audio with original language. Ideally we should be able to select any language that there are available subtitles for. Why restrict it by region ?

The producers likely have distribution agreements on a by-country basis. So, for example WB cannot distribute <movie> in Germany because GEMA has the rights. But GEMA didn't buy the rights for the English subtitles. I imagine technically WB could then sell subtitles rights for <movie> in Germany but it would be a pain because maybe those subtitles were done by <subcompany> for licence in America and Oceania... etc.

GEMA is a collection society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights. Equivalent to BMI / ASCAP. They have nothing to do with films.

They certainly do not buy rights for anything at all. They represent copyright holders and collect fees and distribute them.

Me too! But my problem is slightly different. I'm learning Spanish and would like to watch Spanish movies with Spanish subtitles to improve my understanding.

In Kodi player, I can connect to subtitles sites and have it automatically downloaded. Why don't you do allow it? I know that it is a muddy copyright terrain, but would be a Good Thing for more advanced users.

I seem to share a similar question / problem.

I live in Germany, but I don't speak German. Well, not enough to watch films or feel comfortable browsing the site. Took me a while to find the browse films link as a result.

I was wondering about changing the interface language, and more importantly, whether the film selection will be heavily skewed towards German films (and perhaps without subtitles??).

...I guess I could use a proxy to access it from the UK, but it feels like I'd be trying to trick the system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com