The funny thing about subtitles is that there are many, many cases where you can find bootlegged subtitles for content that don’t even exist on the paid streaming service that provides that content. The streaming services seem to be getting better about this, especially for new content, but there is still a vast library of content on e.g. HBO in the U.S. that doesn’t even have Spanish subtitles.
Yes. It's enormously frustrating that I can not pay Netflix, Google, Hulu to deliver me content in a language other than English. Google's own support pages seem to indicate that if I did do a locale switch to, say, France, that this was a fiddly process and that I would lose all my purchases if I switched it back.
Physical media on Netflix DVD, however, still work just fine and tend to have English and French and often Spanish.
Also, a much larger catalog that hasn't been diced up by license holders.
We're probably a couple years away from some AI service that actually translates with character's voices. Heck probably even adjust the mouth visual too.
I'll support A.I. that translates those characters' voices with different mouth visuals per language. That would be convenient for people who get distracted by subtitles and characters' mouths not matching words to different languages.
I'm pretty sure I've found bootlegged subtitles that are just machine translations of official subtitles in the original language. And YouTube's speech-to-text automated captioning is actually pretty good with single speakers in English with good audio production, enough so that I often use them to follow along with videos.
