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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country!

Sadly, this has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with rightsholders (aka "Hollywood").

The rights on the subtitles are held by the company that makes them, are then sold to the company that distributes the movie, which are then resold to regional distributors, separately from the rights to show the movie. This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles.

It just isn't worth the effort in most cases to negotiate the Transformers English titles in France, for example.

Movie industry licensing and asset packaging are stuck in a time when you had to move physical reels of tape and film around, and still haven't caught up to digital technology.

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> Movie industry licensing and asset packaging are stuck in a time

Relevant quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Until they see disruption or increased profits, I don't expect they'll change. I expect them to actually be disrupted before seeing it coming.

It's already happening. Netflix and Amazon have both got into the content-production game, and one of their stated reasons is that when they make their own content they don't have to deal with region-specific licensing issues.

I don't see how English subtitles for an English movie can even be copyrighted... they're definitely not a work of art, not transformative, just a plain old transcript.

I could see an argument made that the placement of the subtitles in an arrangement for ease of reading, without blocking key visual information, placed such that a viewer can identify which subtitle is spoken by which character, timed such that jokes are not given away prematurely, has a creative aspect in order to make sure that all such constraints are met when creating subtitles.

It isn't a good argument, but I could see it being made.

Subtitles are literally just the scripted dialogue in textual form, so the copyright would belong to the studio (having purchased the script from the screenwriter).

Translated subtitles would be copyrighted by the translator under a derivative license from the studio owning the film.

Subtitles of the type you suggest don't currently exist as standalone products; the level of detail and information you are describing would require the subtitles to be part of the film itself (see e.g., Atomic Blonde or John Wick for good examples).

ASS subtitle format is rich enough to encapsulate this. You see it in anime subs. They're distributed with the product, but it's a separate stream in the MKV.

Well, yeah, the script of the movie is copyrighted.

The copyright of the movie script & audio track extends to the subtitles. It's not an independent work of art, but it's part of one - and the copyright holder certainly can licence you only part of their work or only certain forms of their work, and they've chosen to grant you one transformation and not another.

I guess all that licensing explains why airlines so rarely have English captioning for English-speaking movies. Which really sucks for the deaf and hearing-impaired.

Like the enduser cares about whos fault it is. Netflix could at least allow the loading of custom subtitles.

Nah. Netflix has been enormously disciplined about preventing feature bloat, and I really admire them for it. When this problem gets high enough on their list to solve, I'd much rather they did it right (buying the rights or doing their own subtitles) than some sort of half-assed thing that 90% of humanity won't be able to get to work.

It is very easy actually. Drag and Drop the subtitle onto the screen. MPC-HC and VLC do this. I would safely assume that Netflix could achieve such simplicity too. And even if it's for 10% of the users, people with hearing problems are more in percentage.

There's a lot more to it than that though, especially if you're targeting normal people and not the HN crowd. What if the subtitles are delayed? What if there are problems with the encoding and there are question marks all over the place? All of this is very solvable, but you can't just say "it's very easy actually, just drag and drop".

I can, because it is. Normal people can do that too. I would argue that VLC is mass-compatible.

Since using your own subtitle file, Netflix just doesn't have to do anything besides displaying them. Finding the correct subtitle is the users job, not Netflix. After all this would be called "use your own subtitle here" and I think Netflix can handle Unicode. Not everything has to be spoonfed for the dumbest user alive. Also, I don't think there is a reliable way to detect delays in the subtitle, especially if it's in a different language then the audio track. If you have a reference subtitle track, this might work, comparing time of first appearance. Any subsequent offset might be due to 25/23,976 which could be detected, but again, this is not Netflix's problem.

To me, whenever I hear someone (seems to have died down) about abundance/scarcity economics, that's exactly is exactly what I think of.

Everyone could have access to all movies/songs/books ever written with every subtitle file, dvd-only extra and whatnot they want. Could in the sense that it already exists and the marginal cost of delivering it to people is 0.

All that dealmaking, liscencing and such that you are describing... They're not strictly necessary. At least, they are not required to deliver the "goods." They are required in order to get revenue. Revenue requires pricing which requires exclusion, scarcity.

Not giving everyone everything is wasteful.

This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles.

Sound is part of the film license in the US and Europe. This includes music and songs within the film. Studios pay out big bucks to license songs for films.

For example: my current employer would pay a license of approximately $500 to license major label music that will be played at an event to a live audience, broadcast globally, and streamed to 10 million viewers. (The total music budget for a 3-day event is maybe $5000, and that covers hours of music.) A movie studio licensing that same song for a movie would pay a minimum of $25,000, just for that song, assuming that it's part of the back catalog. A song that made the top 100 of the Billboard lists when it was released could command more than $100,000.

That's not entirely accurate. The song is only licensed for certain uses. For old TV shows especially, digital streaming wasn't a thing, so it wasn't included in the license. They have to be renegotiated for streaming.

That's why sometimes the songs in the shows on Netflix are different than the ones on the DVDs, for example.

But they always seem to offer English CC though, just not the regular ones (for many movies). And the regular ones should just be a simple transformation of the CC ones (strip all "\[.*?\]" stuff). That said, the other day I watched the movie "Easy A" which did happen to have both English CC and normal English subtitles. Still the only one I've found so far though.

Technically it is easy to create the subtitles, but legally that would be a derivative work of the CC subtitles, so again, it comes down to copyright law. :(

Wouldn't it be a derivative work of the original movie instead? (Assuming that the person creating them didn't use the CC subtitles as a reference point)

Just curious about the technicalities of copyright law.

Well I only phrased it that way because OP suggested running a regular expression on the English CC subtitles. :)

English CC is offered in English speaking countries probably for legal reasons. They are not available elsewhere in the world. In Germany you get only German subtitles.

For whatever reason this is not the case for series in Netflix, which most of the time contain also in English subtitles. Wouldn't have helped the original commenter's case of course.

English CC for English speaking countries is actually for deaf people. There's some new rule/law that is actually making websites include English CC's in order to be compliant, though I'm not sure what the penalty is for ignoring that (probably fines).

That’s not correct. All recent shows I watched on Netflix in Germany (on a German account) had English CC subtitles in addition to typically a range of others. This includes Originals and external content such as Star Trek TNG

Yes as I mentioned most series have English subtitles, while movies do not. I don't have a clue what's behind this difference.

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