Saturday, July 12, 2014

Amazon Prime (Germany) and Original Language

I just started using Amazon Prime, that is for accessing their Amazon Instant Video, in Germany. Unfortunately the service doesn't allow switching between languages, dubbed and original. Or so I thought. Technically you can't really switch between languages of the movies or tv shows, but at least they have some offerings in that direction. What you can do is add "OV" (original version) or "OmU" (original with subtitles) to the search when looking for a particular movie or tv show, e.g. "Breaking Bad OV". (OmU usually means that the language is the original one plus subtitles, but almost all the time you cannot turn off the subtitles (which will be usually in German).

Unfortunately only a rather small portion of the overall content on amazon.de is available in the original language. Better than nothing, but it's now 2014 and I would really expect that in the global environment and economy we're living in, it's a cruel joke that this dual offering (original and dubbed) is not possible. Companies will argue, "oh yeah, but we don't have the proper DRM for this kind of offering, bla bla", while usually they're claiming "we there customer", "we understand the customer", etc. etc.

Then please understand, this dual language offering is what we want! And yes, subtitles would be nice, too, if you turn them off and on!