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 genuinely hard to politely state how big an underachievement this press release is describing. One show! One language! ONE! This is a megacorp with 14,000 staff showing this off like a three year old proudly holding up an ugly finger painting of an amorphous blob. They're the 'N' in FAANG, not some tiny startup with limited resources!
Stand back and try to look at this objectively, from the perspective of the "core product" of Netflix. What is it that customers are actually buying from them?
It is just video with audio and text.
That's it. That's all it really is. Everything else is just overhead of some sort, a mechanism for the customers getting to that video, audio, and text.
I bet there's thousands of overpaid staff in there busy rearranging the layout of some metrics dashboard for management that has never bothered to even look at it. I bet there's dozens if not hundreds of AI/ML engineers, not one of which has bothered to run the subtitles through an LLM to strip out the SDH parts.
This is why startups succeed and megacorps fail. They lose their vision, they lose sight of their core products, they stop delivering quality to their customers and instead focus 99% of their efforts on internal bullshit that has zero effect on what the customers experience.
The customer experience of Netflix subtitles is objectively terrible, and they've failed to fix it for a decade, despite having over ten thousand staff and a budget measured in billions.
PS: Note that they said "for Netflix originals". They won't bother to fix the subtitles for anything they didn't make themselves!
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…