It’s astonishingly how inept organisations become as they scale up at executing on their core mission.
There has been an endless parade of self-congratulatory articles here on HN by Netflix espousing their incredible engineering feats: petabytes of logs ingested per second! Millions of microservices redeployed hourly! Hardware accelerated encryption so nobody knows that you’re not watching the same ten shows as everyone else!
Subtitles?
Oh that… crickets for a decade.
This piece is proudly showing off how finally, finally they added “English” as a language!
Think for a moment how inane that actually is.
Not for every show! Just one. One.
This warranted a press release.
Now look at the screenshot: it has only four (4) languages. Six options if you count Off and the duplication of English.
What happened to the other hundred or so? Too many? How about just the dozen or so with more than a hundred million speakers?
Netflix can serve petabytes of content, but a few hundred kilobytes of text files is a technical challenge that’s just a step too far.
Ah well, maybe my partner can watch a show with me and get subtitles in her preferred language next year. Or the year after. Any decade now, any decade…
It’s astonishingly how inept organisations become as they scale up at executing on their core mission.
There has been an endless parade of self-congratulatory articles here on HN by Netflix espousing their incredible engineering feats: petabytes of logs ingested per second! Millions of microservices redeployed hourly! Hardware accelerated encryption so nobody knows that you’re not watching the same ten shows as everyone else!
Subtitles?
Oh that… crickets for a decade.
This piece is proudly showing off how finally, finally they added “English” as a language!
Think for a moment how inane that actually is.
Not for every show! Just one. One.
This warranted a press release.
Now look at the screenshot: it has only four (4) languages. Six options if you count Off and the duplication of English.
What happened to the other hundred or so? Too many? How about just the dozen or so with more than a hundred million speakers?
Netflix can serve petabytes of content, but a few hundred kilobytes of text files is a technical challenge that’s just a step too far.
Ah well, maybe my partner can watch a show with me and get subtitles in her preferred language next year. Or the year after. Any decade now, any decade…