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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

I remember spending 2 hours trying to buy a new TV show in Germany but in English (so on Amazon.com and not .de). VPN, fake US address, virtual gift card sent from one account to another. Nothing worked. In the end, I pirated the show.

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Localization issues are one of those things that cross the border of insanity. Yes, dear distributors, I understand that you want to make moniez by translating movies to local languages. But in every country, a good chunk of population can speak English, and many of us actually prefer to watch in English. That chunk of population usually also has money to spare, so why won't you let us pay you and watch the original material?

It hasn't been an issue for me in the past couple of years but I recall, in the not-to-distant past, that I often had to pirate things that were unavailable to me. I'd attempt legal ways of purchasing but they would fail and I would have to resort to piracy. I feel that content creators have become a whole lot better at making content available than they were 5 years ago.

Regarding buying, "The Gifted" is not available at Amazon.de but is at Amazon.com. And that's without the problem of often not available English subtitles even when English audio is available.

On Netflix Germany (the only Netflix I can get since they banned VPNs) I can't watch most animes in Japanese with English subtitles.

On Prime Video from Amazon.de, they often don't bother to even license the OV audio at all.

The Netflix web player can use external subtitles provided by the user, on the other hand, if you aren't using the right combination of browser and platform, you are restricted to 720p.

So, yeah, not really a solution...

Yes. That's exactly my issue. Often they also only have English in Stereo.

Baked in subtitles that you can't turn off, drives me damn near insane.

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