Ampere: Netflix Prioritizing Dubbing in Major EU Markets

Ampere Analysis has found that Netflix is customizing its localization strategy for key markets, choosing to prioritize dubbed content in countries such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, while focusing on subtitles in smaller markets.

While Netflix has accelerated its local original content commissioning activity, locally produced titles still represent the minority of its catalog in all its markets. Accordingly, Netflix has to rely on subtitling and dubbing to localize for audiences in its many territories.

Ampere finds that Netflix overwhelmingly uses subtitles compared to its local counterparts. In most markets, dubbing represents less than 30 percent of Netflix’s catalog of foreign titles. In large markets like Japan, over 40 percent of titles are dubbed and nearly every program has subtitles. Netflix’s dubbing priority is currently focused on the four largest EU markets: France, Germany, Italy and Spain—60 percent of foreign content in these territories is dubbed.

For English-speaking countries and Netflix’s major markets, it ensures at least 95 percent coverage of local subtitles. However, large emerging markets currently have lower coverage— Russia and Turkey have low subtitling and dubbing rates—and Ampere expects these markets to be a focus for further localization efforts as Netflix uptake slows in mature markets.

For English-speaking markets, local language content comprises 70 percent of titles. The remaining 30 percent are mostly subtitled. For French, German-, Italian- and Spanish-speaking markets, around 90 percent of titles are foreign language, and dubbing is much more common. Outside of a handful of large key markets (Japan, India, South Korea and the Nordics), any markets that rely on other languages feature far lower levels of subtitling or audio dubbing, with many titles not featuring any localization at all.

Tingting Li, analyst at Ampere Analysis, said: “For Netflix, the level of localization of foreign-language titles largely depends on the markets. In English-speaking countries, Netflix’s strategy is to localize foreign titles via English subtitles, while in other key markets, such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, the streaming giant makes certain that most foreign titles are either subtitled or dubbed—catering to local content preferences.  For other markets, such as Russia and Turkey, which represent a smaller portion of Netflix’s subscriber base, and thus harder to justify extensive localization investments, between 13 percent and 28 percent of content is localized—but we expect this to change as market penetration grows.”