Imagine watching the first season of Breaking Bad, getting hooked, and then all of a sudden the last 10 minutes of the season finale are cut off. You have no idea how it ends. You’d be all like, what is this, The Sopranos? That’s similar to what happened to Patrick. He’s hearing-impaired and enjoyed watching Breaking Bad on Netflix Instant Streaming with subtitles. That is, until he got to the season finale, which had no subtitles. Netflix doesn’t offer Patrick much of a way to make his voice heard, so he’s writing here.

Patrick writes:

Dear Consumerist,

As a hearing-impaired Netflix subscriber, I’m sure you can understand that subtitles are a necessity for me when watching DVDs and Streaming Content. I, along with most of the deaf community and everyone else who needs or wants subtitles have waited very patiently as Netflix sorted through the technical issues that delayed adding subtitles to streaming content.

While I am very appreciative of their efforts to add subtitles to more and more online content, I am very disappointed with the way they handle the subtitles for television shows. For some reason, they deem it perfectly acceptable to subtitle most, but not all episodes of a show that is available for streaming, and is even listed under their “official” search for subtitles, http://movies.netflix.com/Subtitles. The most recent example is Season 1 of Breaking Bad. A wonderful, critically acclaimed show, and Netflix subtitles the first 6 episodes, and just when you’re hooked, the last episode (episode 7) of the season is not subtitled!!! More examples include: Episode 2, Season 3, Weeds; Episode 6, Season 2.0, Battlestar Galactica; Episodes 26 and 36, Season 1, Sports Night…it goes on and on…

This is really no different than cutting off a stream to a movie 10 minutes before the end. Imagine the uproar from Netflix’s customers if that were to happen with a significant percentage of their movies. So, the reason why I’m reaching out to you is because Netflix makes it almost impossible to communicate this to them in any way that will get a response.

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