Hacker News Reader

> This is the way this is supposed to work: Netflix designs a service. People who don't enjoy service give feedback to Netflix. Netflix then decides how (and how quickly) to improve their service. If people are happy with this, then everyone wins.

Your argument misses the point of the ADA though, which is that the cost-benefit of accommodating disabled people is never worth it. The best you can hope for are ghettoized solutions for demographics that have sufficient clout for a meager market to emerge. There are some problems which pure capitalism can not solve, but we nevertheless deem worth solving as a society.

That said, video streaming is far too nascent an area to be hamstrung by this type of activist regulation.

Yes, you are right.

In all honesty though, "closed captioning" is not Netflix's business & it's probably not something they are good at. When I was writing my post, I was under the assumption that deaf people already have tools to support this (like real time speech to text tools grabbing audio from the sound card).

I'm not aware that such a product exists, google has played around with automatic captioning on youtube but it's still a very long way from perfect.

I think the view of the ruling would be that if you are selling video then closed captioning should be part of your business.

I'm not sure how good they would need to be at it, beyond hiring a few people with some experience doing this or more likely getting subtitles from somewhere else that has already done them.

They wouldn't even need to be good at it themselves, necessarily - they could contract it out.

Or, better yet, demand CC if it exists for submitted titles, because in the vast majority of cases it does.

If there's a licensing issue here, then people should be suing hollywood.

Sounds like a fine solution to me.

This doesn't work in real life. Your scenario would apply just as well to not serving "blacks" and "coloreds". Well if they don't like it, they can complain to management and it will get fixed when they feel like it.

That's a bit of a straw man argument. Serving "blacks" and "coloreds" does not require any extra work. Serving people with various disabilities can take an extreme amount of extra work.

I'm assuming these movies are captioned by the studio or somebody anyway in order to provide the DVD subtitles, how much extra work would it really be to add them to a netflix stream?

I think dasil003 made the point better than I did. My main problem with dfxm12's post is that the way he describes "This is the way this is supposed to work" does not work.

I don't think that is a good metaphor. There is a significant difference between forcing a company to provide equal service to everyone regardless of skin colour and forcing them to provide additional services for the benefit of disabled people. In the former case they'd just be being racist and nasty by refusing to serve black people with their existing product, in the latter they may not actually have this additional service - eg. they may not have closed captions for their video yet, or there may be technical restrictions on why they cannot provide them, etc.

Your analogy makes no sense. Netflix isn't 'not serving "blacks"': Def people are allowed to use Netflix all the same as other people, but as they can't hear what is said their experience is arguably worse than other peoples, but that is not Netflix's fault.

Did you read the comment I replied to? My point is that "complaining to management" will never work, which is why we have laws and regulations.

Yes I read it and I was trying to point out why I thought you were wrong in using racial segregation as a metaphor.

It is a totally different thing to deny someone service based on factors they cannot control as skin-color or disabilities, than to not extend your service to take every group in the world into account.

If i develop a service that is useful to a lot of people, I shouldn't be punished for not taking into account every possible user.

I am not saying that deaf people don't deserve to be able to watch movies on Netflix, but I think that Netflix should be encouraged through grants etc. to make the site more useful for people with disabilities instead of forced.

As a society, we have decided to extend services to people even when it doesn't make economic sense, or is a pain, or slows down or economy as a whole, etc. Like building ramps, or reserving parking spots. Or putting captions on movies.

Because netflix is the biggest and may slowly become the place to watch movies. It also sets a precedent because more online content is being consumed as video rather than straight text.

The problem with free-marketism in cases like this is that we are talking specifically about quite small minorities (less than 1% of the population are deaf) therefor it's quite likely that most business can ignore them without noticing a difference in their bottom line therefor the problem would never be fixed.

>>Because netflix is the biggest and may slowly become the place

The place each person watches is on their personal computers. When a user streams content or "looks" at a webpage, they are downloading it and viewing it on their personal computer. In this context, where is this place of public accommodation?

This case is like suing the sales man on the corner that you buy your newspaper from because he doesn't know sign language.

Of course this is all a rather technical interpretation of the situation, but think about it another way. Should this precedent be set, American businesses could be paying tens of thousands of dollars more than foreign business websites who need not comply with U.S. Law. The best part is closed captioning streaming video is just the tip of the iceberg. Once the ADA patent trolls get moving, we may our see(or what would have been our) tech start-ups incorporate abroad to lesson not only the direct web site costs, but the lawyer fees they will be paying once the ADA trolls think they are richer enough to be extorted.

Ammmerrricca, Fuck Yeah!

Whether or not you download the content for viewing is really an implementation detail, the web is regarded as a place for public publishing.

The patent issue is a separate one, so I think if the government wants people to comply with this then they have some obligation to help protect people from patent trolls.

My understanding is that the ADA requirements are based on what can be reasonably expected of the company based on its resources. If you're a small company turning a modest profit and you rent a space, you don't need to worry as much about putting in ramps and whatnot as if you're Walmart and you build a building. For the man selling newspapers on the street corner, learning sign language is a big investment. Netflix has the resources to manage this.