> you perhaps didn't understand what they did
I read and understood their entire technical whitepaper. I get the what, I'm just saying that the why might not make as much sense as you might assume.
> +40 different players you deal with
They own the clients. They wrote the apps themselves. This is Netflix code reading data from Netflix servers. Even if there are third-party clients (wat!?), that doesn't explain why none of Netflix's home-grown clients support more than 5 subtitle languages.
> Getting those players, which you may not own, to recognise multiple sub tracks can be a PITA.
This is a core part of the service, which everyone else has figured out. Apple TV for example has dozens of subtitle languages.[1]
With all due respect: Read what you just wrote. You're saying that an organisation that has the engineering prowess to stream at 200 Gbps per edge box and also handles terabytes of diagnostic log ingestion per hour can't somehow engineer the distribution of 40 KB text files!?
I can't even begin to outline the myriad ways in which these excuses are patent nonsense.
These are children playing with the fun toys, totally ignoring like... 1/3rd of the viewing experience. As far as the users are concerned, there's nothing else of consequence other than the video, audio, and text that they see on the screen.
"Nah, don't worry about the last one, that only affects non-English speakers or the deaf, we only care about DEI for internal hires, not customers."
[1] Just to clarify: I'm asking for there to be an option to select one language at a time from all available languages, not showing multiple languages at once, which is a tiny bit harder. But... apparently not that hard, because I have two different free, open-source video players on my PC that can do this so I can have my spouse get "full" subtitles in a foreign language while I see the "auto" English subtitles pop up in a different colour when appropriate. With Netflix I have to keep toggling between her language and my language every time some foreign non-English thing is said. Netflix is worth $362B, apparently, but hasn't figured out something put together by poor Eastern European hobbyists in their spare time.