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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.

Isn’t that right for Switzerland? What’s the issue?

That's how Americans view Europe, yes. "The user lives in Switzerland so they speak both" :) in reality there's German-speaking Swiss and French-speaking ones. In fact there's even Italian-speaking ones but they don't usually make the cut for services like this. The division is pretty much divided by region and heritage. They will technically speak both but will not prefer to. Also besides the languages there's also a cultural difference. And Swiss-German is quite different from German/Austrian German too but let's not get into that.

Just bunching all the content "because your country is .ch so you will like all of this stuff" is such a typical American oversimplification.

> They will technically speak both but will not prefer to.

Well, there are places in Switzerland like Bern that are officially and pragmatically bilingual.

Yes but many are not. And more importantly: many of its inhabitants are not.

It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.

In the UK we have many Asian shows on Netflix. We watch them on captions. It's not has hard as you'd imagine. Give it a go!

Imagine half of them would be all Asian and not just the big bucks international focused ones like Squid Game. But local ones not tailored for it. You'll tune out soon. It's like going for a regular cinema but getting an arthouse collection.

I travel a lot (at least before Corona) and sometimes Netflix would not even allow me to continue watching a movie in the hotel, in the same subtitle language as I watched it before. Because I connected from an IP in Romania I'm suddenly supposed to speak their language too :S Because the options for captions in other languages disappear. This really annoyed me as I often would pop up in different countries and using a VPN was too slow on crappy hotel WiFi.

It's this kind of shortsighted vision that I argue against. The world is not that simple. Maybe in the US it is but not everywhere.

Region locked content is usually enforced by the provider of the content, not the distributer. So don't blame Netflix, blame the studio who licensed the content. I'm sure Netflix would prefer to work with blanket international licenses rather that have to negotiate different terms for different content in each individual country.

> It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.

Sure, at the local movie theater we have Indian films (probably multiple regions), Korean films, Chinese ones, sometimes Spanish and so on. English is hardly the only language around. My wife (Chinese) consumes a lot of Korean dramas on Netflix.

My feeling about Switzerland when living there is that it was slightly less multi-cultural than the states, having a much stronger desire for immigrants to assimilate and become "suisse" (but disclaimer, I was living on the French side). You can still find the multi-cultural stuff, but version originale is the exception, not the rule.

So they can pick and chose what they want based on their preference can't they?

What's the huge issue? Is preferring German and being presented French some kind of slight?

It is a bit yes. I've not been to Switzerland but I know that in Belgium this is totally not done. Flemish speakers often despise French culture and vice versa. And have their own TV channels, shows, media personalities etc. I'm Dutch myself and am often viewed as Flemish by the French speakers when I try to speak French, and I can feel the hate (it's quite uncomfortable so I don't usually go to their parts).

Also, Netflix already shows so little in their overview, making half of them non-starters is really annoying. The world is not a cookie cutter duplicate of America with just some different language settings. There should be an option for local differences (not just this one but ones that exist in many countries). It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.

In fact I'm quite surprised the US has such a harmonised culture because they have huge differences too. I just can't wrap my head around how a Silicon Valley hipster can be just as offended by half a boob on TV than a methodist Midwestern. Though only for the latter it's an actual cultural and religious issue. The level of cultural harmonisation despite all the regional differences is something that's pretty unique in the US I believe. I've travelled a lot and I've not seen this in other countries.

> It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.

That surprises me - Netflix seem pretty good at accommodating UK culture as a contrast. Local shows like The Crown, for example.

Some local productions yes. They do that in every EU country too because it's in fact an EU requirement to do so. But the UK is culturally much more similar to America than the rest of Europe.

For us there should just be a preferred language setting instead of just dumping the user in a certain box because of the IP they connect from.

Huh—I never saw Netflix' British content as accommodating UK culture, but as accommodating American Anglophilia. Same reason they have a ton of Japanese content.

Maybe it's both, I suppose.

Deducing language preferences by the country TLD is just plain wrong. Especially in a country where about 25% of the population is from abroad.

My knowledge of French is basically non existent so showing stuff that is only available in French is completely useless to me. Even worse, it's confusing as I am not sure if there even is a German version on the site or not.

The strange thing is my profile is set to German. A better experience would be if I could set my preferred languages. If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.

> If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.

Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?

I think people are here confused why they get offered films in other languages as if it's a bug? It's not - in the UK for example almost everyone only speaks English but we still have a lot of Asian films and series in our catalogue - people just happily watch them with subtitles.

Some of the most popular shows in the UK Netflix are not in English, such as Squid Game.

> Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?

I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.

For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.

I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.

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