Most of us are aware how geoblocks are one more reason people nudge towards piracy. Well, I didn’t knew that companies imposed geoblocks even on free content.
The worst part is when they geo-block accessibility. Netflix likes to make subtitles regional. In their mind no one ever moves to another part of the world to a country where they aren't 100% fluent in the language. Doesn't happen. I'm assuming their execs don't hire any staff in their mansions that aren't completely bilingual. You compare this to something like Disney and Apple who have a subtitle list a mile long on every show, Netflix will just heavily region restrict and even restrict subtitle availability by profile language. Lived in Korea, on my english profile Korean subtitles were available. A month after moving to an English speaking country, Korean subtitles disappeared from my profile (on the android TV app, they're still there in Desktop view, sometimes). A korean profile on the same android TV app? Korean is a choice. Their android TV app just cuts off several subtitle options for no reason.
Wait, blocking subtitles of all things? TV shows and films often get entangled in copyright issues, which sometimes make them regionally available only, but subtitles! That’s preposterous.
Yeah, they claim it's because of 'local distributors' to that region not giving them the subtitles, but I know, for example, that Korean movies are 99.5% always released on DVD, even in Korea with English subtitles. Yet in Korea, half the Korean content wouldn't have English subtitles, yet in other markets it did. Ironic that my spouse and I find it easier to consume Korean content outside of Korea than inside Korea.
You see this on youtube as well. Inside Korea a lot of movies are available through youtube with Korean subtitles embedded on them. They're cheap too, Often you can get new movies for under $5 (purchased, not rented), older ones can often be around $1. Same movie in another country, no subtitle, or certainly not Korean subtitles. Youtube has native subtitle support and they don't use it. At least we can VPN into Korean youtube and purchase things.
Amazon is bad for it. If you go into a show and look at the subtitles some of them are clickable. Meaning it searches by that subtitle language to show you more content that has that language as a subtitle. Problem is their subtitles are regional and they don't filter based on region. So when you search for Korean you might get 100 results with less than 30% actually having Korean subtitles. But they return the result because they have Korean subtitles in another region. My guess is in the US or Japan as Korea does not have it's own Amazon region since they don't operate there.
Disney plays its own games. Extraordinary season 2 is missing most of the Asian subtitles that were available for season 1. So we can't pick that up even though we enjoyed season 1.
Being a multicultural family and trying to consume content legitimately is exhausting to be honest.
If a distributor for Korean movies in the US was the only company that subtitled a movie in Spanish for example, then Netflix would have to make a deal with them to include subtitles for every region. It might be that the distributor themselves may not have the rights to distribute those subtitles outside the US as well.
Part of the reason I abandoned Amazon Prime is the complete lack of subtitles on half the content.
You can’t even download the subs from a third party source, because all these services insist you watch everything through their own locked down player.
But you know, there’s a service with all the content you want, subtitles for any language, up to 4K Blu-ray quality visuals and audio, and you never see a “leaving soon” sticker on anything you’re just getting into and still have 4 seasons left to watch. And it’s called Jellyfin.
That bit is called Bazarr. You do occasionally have to dick about as well, as the subs might not be for that file, different cuts of the movie, different studio credits depending on where it was ripped from, etc.
Fortunately most movie and TV rips contain the subs in the mkv file.
Thanks, I was mostly wondering about Japanese series and especially anime, which sometimes seem impossible to get with Japanese subtitles outside of japan
It can, there’s an Open Subtitles plugin that can automatically download subtitles in specified languages that match (or don’t) the file hashes of your media. Being an open database of subtitles, though, YMMV. You configure it on a per-library basis.
You sound like you aren’t from Australia! Vast majority of geoblocking is for free content actually (selectively free, that is). Things like Netflix US having different titles to Canada isn’t really geoblocking, unless it’s for a Netflix Original (not aware of any such cases)
Yeah, so much US content gets geoblocked here. It’s super weird, just a random clip from a show on youtube? woops, looks like that content isn’t available in your country.
Many US based websites are no longer displaying content to Europeans, since they can’t legally harvest data. Youtube, Instagram and other websites/apps playing licensed content are also increasingly disregarding countries where licenses are expensive and/or revenue is low.
I’d really look into getting a good VPN. Mullvad ($5/month) is awesome, or else Proton in the free tier (can’t pick the server but get one assigned at random, might need to restart to get one in a useful location).
(can’t pick the server but get one assigned at random, might need to restart to get one in a useful location)
Oh, you absolutely can. You can download Wireguard or OpenVPN configs for specific servers even with free tier.
On Android I use: github.com/schwabe/ics-openvpn
Though they don’t let you select servers in Romania and Poland. Perhaps they just forgot to update the download page.
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