4K UHD: Fewer subtitles than on regular Blu-ray? Why?

[unberechenbar]

Originally Posted by PanaPlasma

I'm not aware of this?

Discs from Belgium / Netherlands have smaller age ratings on their cover compared to UK, US & Germany.
Or no ratings at all...

Our market is completely ignored for blu-ray or uhd releases. Mediocre dvd's is often the only thing we get.
And recently more and more dvd-releases got cancelled.
Often we got ignored for streaming and legal downloads as well. Many titles are OOP because majority of local distributors have gone bankrupt.

Blu-ray or 4K has never been promoted which resulted in bad sales, so they started cancelling blu-ray's in favor of dvd's.

Same goes for France.... the very few supermarkets that are still offering physical media have replaced blu-ray's for dvd's.

At some point Carrefour France had a large blu-ray section but after some time they had to remove them... back to 95% dvd - 5% blu-ray.

A guy at Mediamarkt Belgium (biggest store in belgium for blu-ray) told me, that they couldn't get rid of blu-ray's. At some point they offered the blu-ray at 50% of the price of the dvd. And 90% of the customers still bought the dvd.

Many of those who bought the blu-ray ... returned it because it wouldn't play on a dvd player.

Most people never heard of blu-ray and don't know it wouldn't play on standard dvd players.

It's not because lack of finances, as dutch speaking part of Belgium + Netherlands are amongst the wealthiest regions in Europe.

That's a real shame.

[PanaPlasma]

But for the people that want 4k and blu-ray, they could add subtitles to the uk, us or german releases for the titles where licensing is ok, like e.g. disney.

It can't be that difficult to add subtitles.

Disney is a mainstream product with collectors worldwide. Sales are assured.

I understand it's difficult for indie movies from independent companies with various distributors...

But for mainstream titles... they have often the same distributor in most parts of the world.

[singhcr]

Originally Posted by professorwho

Also, I'm not aware if subtitles can be locked- as in, can't be turned off. Sometimes a rights holder will request locked subtitles to avoid "reverse-importation".

On Blu-ray and DVD you can force subtitles as I used to author my own so I imagine the same rule applies to UHD.

That being said if you have a player like the Oppo 203 that can move subtitles (thank goodness because I absolutely hate having subs in the letterbox region of a scope movie) during playback, perhaps you can move the forced subs completely off the screen that way.