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Comment by CuriousRose | Hacker News Reader

Somebody I know has gone back to torrenting. They state it’s far easier to do that than find content among their combined $100 monthly subscriptions, most of which has modern movie slop catalogues, while great classic films you need to pay for separately anyway. The execs will never learn.

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Imagine you are born and raised in brasil. You have a netflix subscription there and you can watch the things you want with brasilian audio and/or subs. Now, you move to another continent. You can watch the same content, but not with the audio/subtitles in a language you understand. When this person torrents this content, each and every language audio and/or subtitle is simply available and thus this person can watch the content, they were willing to pay for, without problems.

Once this problem is solved, we get to the 'problem' of having content available scattered over 584778964 apps or available in one.

The language restrictions are absurd. When I visited friends in Germany, there’s lots of content on Netflix that we can’t watch together because subs are only available in German.

I really don’t get what they intend to gain by geo-restricting languages, but it seems to have slipped their minds that people travel or migrate.

I would assume it's to prevent buying accounts in locations with cheaper pricing due to local affordability and using them internationally. A Turkish or African continent country would be a significantly cheaper subscription price than say Singapore or Switzerland.

You can still do that. The subtitle languages are restricted to your current location, not to your account's associated country.

It's probably a side-effect of licensing deals in regions. Besides the audio/video content, the subs are also included in those (at least I think, it being the reason makes the most sense)

All those region regulations worked ok-ish back when globalisation was not a thing. They are very outdated in the current times. But hey, they still make the big players a lot of money so nobody wants to change.

While this may sound exaggerated, I’ve actually on occasion torrented a show because I thought I had to if I wanted to see it, only to later turn out I could have watched on one of the streaming services I’m already paying for.

And that’s just crazy really.

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