Just thought it would be worth pointing out some other costs we don't typically consider here besides development costs is litigation costs...
The most troubling wave of ADA litigation is just beginning to crest. The ADA’s next frontier—and next target of litigation—is the most innovative segment of the domestic economy: e-commerce. The latest trend in ADA litigation is suing commercial websites that aren’t sufficiently accessible to the disabled—because, for instance, they lack assistive technologies for the blind or hearing-impaired. Even though the ADA was enacted before websites became ubiquitous, many courts have interpreted the term “public accommodation” in Title III to encompass the Internet, and will entertain suits applying to it.
In 2008, Target paid $6 million to settle a class-action suit brought by the National Federation of the Blind charging that the retailer’s website was allegedly insufficiently accessible to blind customers. Target also paid nearly $4 million in costs and attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. Why would Target pay $10 million to settle a case when the law is unsettled and its culpability far from certain? Class-action lawsuits are particularly expensive to defend, and because the potential liability is aggregated to reflect the entire class (all blind consumers, in this example), the financial exposure for a firm if it loses in court presents an unacceptable risk to most corporate defendants.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-151...
Was there a tradeoff involved there? Is there content that is not in the Netflix catalog today because of the costs of closed-captioning the rest of the catalog?
If that is the case, are Netflix's customers better or worse off, individually and collectively? Is society better or worse off? (I don't have a clear answer, and I'm not sure there's an objectively clear answer, but I do think that there are tradeoffs in these discussions that are sometimes hidden/ignored.)
I am not aware of any content that got ditched because of this. I imagine only a Netflix admin type person from back then would know something like this.
They only have to provide it, if it originally had captions. They didn't have to caption stuff that never had captions to begin with, but they went ahead and captioned everything, pretty much, and if you look at their new self-created shows, they are typically multi-lingual(multiple voiced languages) and multi-captioned (multiple written languages).
I would say, it forced them to deal with becoming a global provider and not US/English centric like they were, which I think we can say has been good to their business overall :)
The most troubling wave of ADA litigation is just beginning to crest. The ADA’s next frontier—and next target of litigation—is the most innovative segment of the domestic economy: e-commerce. The latest trend in ADA litigation is suing commercial websites that aren’t sufficiently accessible to the disabled—because, for instance, they lack assistive technologies for the blind or hearing-impaired. Even though the ADA was enacted before websites became ubiquitous, many courts have interpreted the term “public accommodation” in Title III to encompass the Internet, and will entertain suits applying to it. In 2008, Target paid $6 million to settle a class-action suit brought by the National Federation of the Blind charging that the retailer’s website was allegedly insufficiently accessible to blind customers. Target also paid nearly $4 million in costs and attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. Why would Target pay $10 million to settle a case when the law is unsettled and its culpability far from certain? Class-action lawsuits are particularly expensive to defend, and because the potential liability is aggregated to reflect the entire class (all blind consumers, in this example), the financial exposure for a firm if it loses in court presents an unacceptable risk to most corporate defendants. https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-151...