Netflix to expand to Germany, France and Switzerland | Hacker News Reader

Netflix to expand to Germany, France and Switzerland

bbc.com

68 pointsnkurz72 comments

I find it so ridiculous that an internet company has to "expand" to another country.

Why can't it just be a matter of removing the geoip checks from your servers?

(I know, I know, still... the internet was not meant to be this way.)

If Netflix just started taking money from German customers while providing them with a terrible service, we would be angry at that.

It makes sense that they might have to get local servers, or at least test the waters before opening the floodgates.

> If Netflix just started taking money from German customers while providing them with a terrible service, we would be angry at that.

That's not the limiting reactant. The actual issue with region lockout is copyright bullshit.

This. The fact that most people seem this ignorant to practical law issues is a major part of why the overall situation (patents, Hollywood, etc) is as shitty as it is, methinks. Uneducated flocks are easier to steer.

Netflix's control plane is in AWS, and their content is distributed by global CDNs; there are no local servers to get.

I would agree though that you do have to ensure content has been staged to your CDN, you have a local control plane in the EU for end-user latency, etc.

I use it from Greece through a proxy and, even then, it's great.

"money"...

Lawyers

- Copyright issues

- Procurement of local films and dubbing/subtitles for existing ones

- Localization of interfaces/apps

- Payment options adequate for every country

- Local tax issues

- Local marketing

I think just the top one is the biggest one.

If someone in Germany wants to pay for non-localised movies or tv shows in English (or any other language) and can use the English website... why stop them?

As the co-founder of the only truly global feature film VOD service I can confirm this is the case. The situation with rights is quite nuanced. An example of one small but annoying detail is the fact that content is often licensed by language, and the local distributor owning streaming rights for a given film will only be interested in the local language rights. So in practice, you may have subtitles in German, French and English, but you can only allow their use in the respective countries. In order to realize the dream of a VOD service where everything is available globally in any language is going to require a complete sea change in the mechanics of film licensing. The technical challenges are comparatively trivial.

While it may be that easy for Netflix on a technical side all of the content must be relicensed for each new region. Often times the content distribution rights for the same TV show may be owned by different companies depending on the country or region thus Netflix must renegotiate a mess of contracts every time it wants to become available in a new place.

This is why content available on Netflix in the United States may be different than content available in Norway.

> This is why content available on Netflix in the United States may be different than content available in Norway.

This hardly feels like an "expansion", then.

I guess the people who care can still use VPNs, like they do right now.

For me, understanding and accepting the answer to this question was an important step to understanding the difference between pure technology and business.

And even in a technologist's utopia where there were no local legal/cultural/language differences between countries, on a pure technology level you'd need to provision server capacity for new locales.

For me, understanding but not accepting the answer to this question was an important step in my moral argument for pirating movies.

I am strongly against piracy, but I am even more strongly agains restrictive, profit-driven, privacy and freedom-trampling business models and legal systems.

I dunno - while there maybe French subscribers who would kill for US TV shows in english only, maybe there's the issue of either subtitling all their content for German and French at least, dubbing some or all of it, and likely adding French-specific content.

Just wondering whether I'll be able to get the French Netflix content without using VPN and a local CC.

The subs or dubs (France prefers dubs, right?) typically already exist.

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7780650

As for needing local credit cards, hopefully some day bitcoins or something like it can truly enable international commerce.

Well, France not so much prefers as is forced to listen to dubbed.

But this is (slowly) changing, you now start to have major TV channels broadcasting TV series and Films in both French dubbed version and Original Version with subtitles. Not all of the channels, and not all of the content, but this is progressing.

Same goes for movies at the cinema (which was already the case in Paris but less in smaller towns),

> "More likely, we'll figure out some stuff's working, some stuff's not; we'll adjust the formula."

I absolutely love this mindset from Netflix. Every conf talk, article I hear from them they talk about stuff that didn't work, that did work for a while but didn't scale. Then show what worked better.

Netflix also must contend with the fact that French audiovisual laws require local broadcasters to invest significant sums in domestic content. However, Les Echos newspaper has suggested Netflix might get around this by basing the service in Luxembourg.

Actually Netflix is already based in Luxembourg for its European activities and there have been news that they're going to move to Netherlands: http://www.wort.lu/en/business/move-to-the-netherlands-netfl...

Aren't there equivalent laws in Canada (minimum canadian content)? Netflix is available in Canada.

The CRTC has basically washed their hands any internet content. They worry about the internet itself, but not the actual stuff you put on it the way they worry about radio/cable/broadcast content. It's naive and inconsistent but as a Netflix fan I can't really complain about it.

To their credit, Netflix does license a bunch of Canadian content from the CBC and Global TV, which shows a good-faith attempt to provide Canadian content. I doubt they pay much for it though, and I doubt their ratio matches the CRTC's requirements.

Well, it remains legal to download music and movies in Switzerland (PirateBay & Co), so there's that.

It's not about legality, it's about convenience, while living in the UK, I honestly stopped downloading illegal stuff and was surviving on spotify+netflix+lovefilm+bbc iPlayer.

Now I'm in Latvia for a while and none of those (except for spotify) work without a proxy. So TPB is my friend again.

I have no problem with paying, just make it convenient and reasonably priced (iTunes I think is not, maybe I'm not rich enough).

In Switzerland, you can legally download but not upload, so bittorrent should not be considered safe.

The interesting loophole for the bittorrent users is the fact that a private company cannot arvest the ip ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/switzerland-gathe... ) addresses from trackers, thus making quite hard the prosecution. (And from past cases, it looks like they will prosecute only people that are doing it for money, not for personal use).

Interesting move from netflix, but I'm quite curious how they will handle the localization of the content. Will they provide italian and french content too in Switzerland? Or like everybody else, they will ignore us linguistic minorities?

How hard can it be to disable upload in bittorrent clients and be a bad but considerably more legal torrent citizen?

not hard at all obviously.

Anyway, given the current legal situation in Switzerland, uploading data with bittorrent while downloading some music/film is basically a no risk activity.

Same here in Germany.

So people are using free streaming services and direct downloads.

The title is incomplete/misleading - six European countries, not just 3:

  Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg

A policy on maximum title length, most likely.

On a side note, Belgium has a higher population than Austria, and Austria a higher population than Switzerland, so the only reason for specifically mentioning Switzerland in the title seems to be that it has a nice ring to it :-)

I'm a German and want to say there is no real competition here. As far as I'm concerned we are waiting desperately for a reasonable streaming service! Even watching in English would not be a problem as long as we could have Netflix! There are people here paying VPN and Netflix, so money should not be an issue.

Eh? There's at least two large video-on-demand streaming services by large companies like Vivendi and Amazon in Germany. Maybe you don't like what they offer (I don't), but saying there's no competition is far-fetched.

Please don't take it too literal.

What? This is hacker news!

Netflix will face no competition in Germany as long as they choose to offer the content in its original language. Those other services insist mostly on showing the ruined/dubbed versions.

I can confirm that. If Netflix is able to offer as big of a selection as in the US then the mentioned services, then Netflix will quickly take over the market. I know of many people that would even prefer watching in English as dubbing is often not very natural.

I'm one of these people paying for VPN and Netflix and I just hope they don't break this as I can't imagine them bringing the same content to Germany. For the content they bring here I hope they make the undupped versions available too. These often have different licenses. Amazon Prime Video for example has an ok library but doesn't offer the undupped versions for a loot of stuff.

> Even watching in English would not be a problem

Actually, that would be the only reason why I would subscribe to Netflix. I completely and utterly despise the German dubbed American and English TV shows and movies. That's why Amazon Prime streams are useless to me.

It's true that there is a difference in quality. But I have to say compared to 90% of the other countries our dubbed versions are actually quite good. I remember watching some dubs on the russian VKontakte where random people (not even the gender seems to be equal) speak directly on the original audio. You have both Russian and English at the same time. Therefore I'm rather proud of the German dubs.

Yep, I hope it's not the dubbed crap everybody else has. I wonder if this is a licensing issue or a service issue.

> while French TV has a lot of subtitling - in Germany foreign language movies and TV shows are generally voiced over

Can anyone explain why this is? I hate watching dubbed video, especially when it's live action.

Tradition and market demand, I guess. I'm not completely philosophically opposed to dubs, but the truth is that the vast majority of German dubs are awful. And I'm talking about major Hollywood films and popular TV series. It really sounds like a bunch of actors sitting in a studio, reading lines melodramatically with zero nuance.

I swear, German radio dramas (which are quite popular) have better voice acting.

Strange. I lived there for nearly 20 years and must say they have pretty much perfected the craft of dubbing movies. I personally still prefer some "alternative voices" over the originals, i.e. for Homer Simpson (sounds more like the fool that he is) or Arnold Schwarzenegger (who's English destroys any fourth wall the moment he opens his mouth).

For Arnold sure, but you are not allowed to prefer any Homer voice over Dan Castellaneta's. Also, don't forget that Homer is only 99% fool, the other 1% is sublime genius.

German dubs are so awful and widespread, that even porn in Germany is dubbed and often enough, even German porn is re-dubbed.

Majority of population preffers it that way for one reason or another (like old people having eye issues and people used to "listening" to TV and others just peeking at it at random while doing other activities), and minority watches movies in cinemas/dvds/bluerays/internet where stuff if subbed instead.

Dutch people prefer subtitles. German, Italian, Spanish and French people prefer dubbing. It's weird and I don't know why it is. Things just evolved to be like that.

The majority of English TV on French national tv is most definitely dubbed. As far as I know it's only the Dutch. Don't know about Scandinavia and Eastern Europe though.

In Scandinavia it's all subtitles.

Yes. Anglo-Saxon culture has permeated Scandinavian culture to a degree you don't find in Western Europe (which also means that most of the population is fluent in spoken English, which is definitely not the case in France, Germany or Spain). You don't find dubbed movies here, unless they are targeted at children.

Here in Portugal we mostly subtitle as well, even though our population is definitively not fluent in English. On the other hand, the older population watches disproportionately fewer shows in English, preferring national daytime talkshows and soap operas (national and imported from Brazil), so dubbing would probably be too expensive per watcher.

In the UK, foreign-language dramas and films are always subtitled.

Foreign language dramas are not common on British TV, but then a few years ago, the BBC broadcast the original Danish version of The Killing which gained a cult following. Since then we've had a whole raft of foreign-language dramas (mostly crime dramas, a lot of them Scandinavian).

I personally much prefer subtitles to dubbing. With dubbing, you get the distracting mismatch between the actors mouth movements and the dubbed dialogue. Plus, the dubbed language will have a different tone and inflection from the original language. At least if you watch with subtitles, the fluency of the dialogue (even when you don't understand it) will feel much more natural.

Where do you get this impression? I've lived in France my whole life and most people I know try to avoid subtitles as much as possible. Most of the foreign TV contents are dubbed anyway, except on a few channels (Arte).

This may be less true for the new generation accustomed to watching subtitled TV shows on the internet, instead of waiting for a few years to get them in French on TV.

This.

I grew up in Belgium, and there were two versions of films on - V.O. (Version Originale) which had two sets of subtitles (Flemish and French) and V.F. (Version Francaise).

The cinema usually had far more Flemish speaking people in the VO screenings than French speaking, so I assume they went to the VF ones.

This is definitely changing, but slowly, yes.

I think that this is at least partially attributable to the average understanding of English in those countries. When you are watching a movie with subtitles, but have absolutely no idea what is being said in the movie because the spoken language is unknown to you, it can be very distracting, because you are missing a certain amount of context. I believe an above-average amount of Dutch people is at least capable of comprehending basic English speech, which puts the movie's subtitles into context. In countries where English isn't as wide-spread, this is more problematic, which is why dubbing is more effective there. Similarly, even in the Netherlands movies which target family audiences are often shown dubbed by default in movie theatres, because the subtitles are just not as effective even if the children that are watching the movie can read them.

I'd guess it's the opposite: average understanding of english is lower _because_ the content is all translated.

Also, I do not know about germany/france/spain, but italian movies have basically always been dubbed, in the sense that italian actors were dubbed by other italian actors.

As a general rule the more speakers a language has the higher the chance of mostly dubbed content. High quality dubs are not cheap and it's easier to finance it when your target language has a 100 million speaker instead of just 5 million.

That's why Germany, France and Spain like to dubs, but not smaller countries like the Netherlands or Scandinavian countries. And medium sized countries like Poland often have really crappy dubs (sometimes one speaker for all characters).

For Italians it is easy explained: our average level of foreign languages' knowledge is ridiculous and if a movie is broadcasted in Original Version most of the people will not understand a bit.. Things are improving with newer generations (e.g. various MTV sort-of shows are subtitled - in Italian) but it will take time, and I'm not sure we will be ever be at the same level of Northern countries..

On the other hand I could say that many Italian dubbers are very good compared to other countries (sometimes they are italian actors as well)

It's true. Kids also learn to read subtitles at an early age (by the time they get 7 most can read subtitles). But Disney doesn't seem to understand: it dubs programs in Dutch, and you get Hanna Montana and others dubbed with an awful (to my Flemish ears) Dutch accent.

A lot of subtitling in France? Nope. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any (by default that is, you can always turn them on). The overwhelming majority of shows are dubbed in France too.

The explanation is some form of ingrained linguistic pride and more pragmatic concerns: viewership would drop about 30% if they stopped dubbing.

http://www.slate.fr/story/18195/pourquoi-la-france-double-t-...

Agree, I moved to Luxembourg and started recently watching some French TV: almost everything is dubbed (while on Sat you can sometimes found the second audio track).

I would also add that while UK televisions are very good at subtitling (almost all the programs are accurately subbed with a 1:1 correspondence with what it is said), French TV are less scarse (not all the channels have subs available and some of those subs use different words)

And interestingly, even for non-dubbed films they'll still translate the title. So the original Star Wars with subtitles will still be announced as "La Guerre des étoiles"

Also interestingly, they will "translate" movie titles that are in English into a different title, also in English. So "The Hangover" becomes "Very Bad Trip".

In fairness, Scrubs is way funnier in German. [1]

Interestingly, when Elliot actually speaks German in the episode they dub that into Italian.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_AMLQ2QTA

Grimm is the most hilarious series - if you know German and watch the original seties. Dubbing a series that is full of 'weird' references in a language to just that language is.. a stupid move.

That reminds me of how when they show Fawlty Towers in Spain they dub Manuel into Italian.

I got the feeling, that most Germans think subtitles are a sign of bad quality.

Many people I know also say, English (and reading) is hard for them and since they watch movies and TV-shows to relax, they prefer german dubbed stuff.

I understand English rather well, so I don't need subs. And if I watch stuff in English, I get it sooner than people who wait for the german dubs...

A huge majority isn't comfortable and completely unused to watching movies in English. I continue to be surprised to find people who dislike it even among my highly educated young^Hmiddle-aged peers. On the other hand there's a sizeable minority who is violently opposed to dubs -- I faintly hope Netflix will monetise on them.

Wonder how that will work out for them. Both Deutsche Telekom and Kabel Deutschland provide their own video on demand services, and together they cover pretty much 99% of all last mile infrastructure.

This is the one thing where they are ahead even of the US competition, which is still deciding if they should "do this content thing" and keeping the network deadlocked and at standstill in the meantime (as the wise aristocrats decide).

With a scant choice of movies on Netflix UK (most of which are either old or at the bottom of the box-office leaderboard) doubt they'll gain any significant traction in EU. I'd rather have them spend extra cash to acquire licences for streaming popular movies and TV shows in EU.

Netflix launched in Sweden about 1.5 years ago. Last week the results of a poll of the public was presented: About 1 million Swedes have access to Netflix streaming at their home. This is out of a population of about 9 million.

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