Subtitles for Instant Watch foreign movies in English

[peterodgers]

For me, many Aussie, Irish, Cockney and lower class Brit accents are not understandable without subtitles. But subtitles are not available for English speaking Instant Watch downloads. Anybody interested in lobbying for a change in this policy? Any ideas regarding how to do so?

[bluebelle]

My husband is English and I lived there myself for 14 years. There are definitely times when we flip on subtitles in English for English language films to help us through thick accents--especially with Scottish films.

Oh, and how about Nick Nolte's mumblings in The Good Thief? But I hate, hate, hate to have the English subs if I don't need them. Some films that use a mixture of languages including English give you English subtitles throughout and that gets really irritating. And I just can't stand being told that music is playing, sound of water running, knock at door, etc. I had a film like that recently.

But really, we're all so spoiled these days having such an incredible menu of films delivered right to our doors or streamed onto our computers. I saw my first foreign language film in 1969--Weekend. For years I went through all kinds of hoops to see good movies. Spoiled, I'm just delightfully spoiled by Netflix!

[Erik]

Yeah, I'm the same way... Kinda disappointing.

[3eyes]

And then there are those of us who are going deaf....

[Maubs]

There's a good deal of discussion on subtitles in the Instant Watch forum.
I agree with many of the posters here, though, that I'd like to have subtitles for every movie. It's nice not to miss the dialog due to an accent. I always turn on the subtitles - to me, it's part of the point of having a DVD player. It was such an improvement to watch a widescreen movie and to have the subtitles appear below the picture, and not cover it up with big blocks of text like with closed captioning!
I do get annoyed when closed captioning is the only option, and you'll get those [water running] or [suspenseful music] captions. I wish the studios would spend more resources on this and provide options for subtitles OR closed captioning for the hearing impaired.
Are you listening, BBC Productions? Subtitles, please!
I used to joke with my Australian friend that we in the MidWest have NO accent, because it's OUR dialect that you hear on the evening news. We tend to pronounce all the letters in a word, even.

[peterodgers]

i wonder if the Aussies and the Scotch and the Irish and the Cockney English have as much trouble with our "evening news" accent as we do with theirs? i suspect that they do.

[Ryan Rawdon]

Instant Watch should allow someone to turn on CC or subtitles for any movie, foreign, domestic, accented or not. There are hearing impaired members of netflix (I googled "netflix subtitles") and most of the posts/sites I found talked about how there is no way for deaf/hearing impaired people to watch netflix movies online without hacking together subtitles in a blank movie in another window.

[Knaldskalle]

Wow, what a novel idea!