In my experience, Netflix is horrid outside the US - a much more limited catalogue and a lot of mismatched foreign language content.
I live in Jamaica and had subscribed to the version that was legitimately available to us w/o using a VPN or proxy or similar service.
The result was twofold:
- less content than on the US version (but the same price)
- a whole lot of content available in overdubbed Spanish only or with baked-on subtitles.
Guess they don't realize that south of the border there are countries that speak English (as well as French, Dutch and Portuguese).
Our cable companies have the same problem trying to legitimately license content from US broadcast and cable networks - they want to dump the "Latin American" feed on us...
> Guess they don't realize that south of the border there are countries that speak English (as well as French, Dutch and Portuguese).
I was working in Italy for a bit although they had audio in English for most programs I wanted to watch, subtitles were only available in Italian. Again, it's all because of licensing...
it is about two things - licensing as well as market size.
in the case of the latter, big media companies just don't care about small markets, as the cost of operating them is greater than the potential profits realized.
in the case of the former, i work in media and you are absolutely right - media licensing is stuck in a 1985 model, which only serves to sustain a few middlemen kind of players, but in the bigger picture sucks for both consumers and the companies that own the content.
one particular result of this is that many people who can't legitimately get what the want (in terms of downloads, streams, etc.) will just pirate it, having tried unsuccessfully to do things the right way and been frustrated.
I live in Jamaica and had subscribed to the version that was legitimately available to us w/o using a VPN or proxy or similar service.
The result was twofold:
- less content than on the US version (but the same price)
- a whole lot of content available in overdubbed Spanish only or with baked-on subtitles.
Guess they don't realize that south of the border there are countries that speak English (as well as French, Dutch and Portuguese).
Our cable companies have the same problem trying to legitimately license content from US broadcast and cable networks - they want to dump the "Latin American" feed on us...