In the late 90s when DVD players proliferated the homes of my friends it became possible for me to watch movies with subtitles at the press of a button. Before that you were dependent on them to have a newish TV set (1993) and for the VHS tape to have captions that worked. Netflix made renting movies something you could do from your computer and the DVDs showed up in the mail a day or two later. Then a few years ago Netflix introduced instant streaming for some titles…. but there were no captions. Now, after hearing protests from people who need captions and subtitles and promising to deliver, there are quite a few movies on Netflix that have subtitles and captions. I only just realized this though myself. Why? Because I have an iPad and the Netflix iPad app doesn’t support captions! They’ve caught up to where I was last year.
Netflix also doesn’t provide a great way to search for movies that ARE captioned. For that, I just learned about http://feedfliks.com
Feedfliks displays stats about how many movies you’ve rented, how much you pay for each movie, how long you keep a disk at home before sending it back (ouch, I always do this!). It also has a search where one of the options is “Instant Watch – with Subtitles”! How useful! I’ll have to switch back to the computer to watch things, but at least now I can branch out from the foreign movies I’ve been focusing on lately.
And hopefully they’ll add captioning support for all of their other viewing devices ASAP.
I hope it improves too. There has been a lot of anger at Netflix for imposing a ‘deaf tax’ in its decision to increase DVD rental prices higher than that of streaming or downloads which is extremely unfair when there is little captioned content except for the DVDs.
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