Do you even remember what TV was like before streaming?
Depending on how old you are, you might recall “Must-See TV” periods, like the 1990s lineup featuring Friends and Seinfeld or The Sopranos and Breaking Bad in the early 2000s.
Of course, must-see TV used to mean you actually had to watch the show — and on an actual television — at its scheduled time if you wanted to be current.
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But circa 2007 Netflix’s (NFLX) streaming service really took off and we all learned about the pleasures of binging on past episodes our favorite shows. Then Netflix started making its own productions, starting with House of Cards in 2013.
Small-screen entertainment has never been the same.
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Netflix is now the most popular subscription streaming platform in the world with more than 282 million subscribers worldwide. (Amazon Prime is a distant second with 200 million and Disney + lags way behind both with 151.3 million, according to Digital Trends.)
Since that House of Cards launch a decade ago, the company has moved beyond streaming old television series and jumped with both feet into original series and film productions, reality TV and even live sports.
Netflix has produced Oscar-winning films and Emmy-winning series. And it makes the majority of its programming available in multiple languages.
Squid Game, a show in the Korean language, is among Netflix’s most popular.
Image source: Shutterstock
Netflix has expanded in many ways a decade after its first original show
Netflix’s catalog includes a wide variety of TV shows and movies in over 30 languages which the company says “lets our members immerse themselves in different cultures and languages from around the globe.” Nearly a third of all viewing on Netflix is of non-English stories — subtitles and dubbing are more important than ever to the company.
Looking at some of the company’s most popular TV and film titles of all time like Squid Game (Korea), Berlin (Spain), Lupin (France), Who Killed Sara? (Mexico), Troll (Norway), and Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front (Germany), Netflix says language availability is what helped these stories and characters find fans beyond their country of origin.
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Netflix also shared recently that its subscribers have said they use Netflix to learn a foreign language thanks to the many languages available on the platform.
The company says it has received thousands of language availability requests per month and it responded to its subscribers with surprising news.
Most popular Netflix shows are not all in English
Netflix just announced subscribers will now be able to pick from the full list of available languages for any title when watching Netflix on a TV. This much-anticipated feature carries over the experience members already enjoy on mobile devices and web browsers.
The company debuted Squid Game Season 2 during the last week of December 2024 and within 11 days it had captured 126.2 million views. That set a record for Netflix and for streaming overall. The show topped Netflix’s non-English speaking list in 92 countries, according to a company statement. (The third and final season of Squid Game is due in 2025 and is sure to break records again.)
The company offers several additional features to support language learning, including the ability to customize subtitles, and the “Browse by Language” feature on computers. These features enhance the accessibility of Netflix shows and movies, while supporting those set on being multilingual, the company says.
So if you’re trying to learn a new language by viewing your favorite Mexican show with Korean dubbing and English subtitles, or watching the latest Netflix discovery with family members who speak several languages, the Netflix TV experience just got a whole lot more multilingual.
Subtitles are nothing new — according to Netflix around 40% of people watch shows with closed captioning turned on — but the company also made a commitment to feature more shows with Audio Descriptions (AD) and Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH). Further, the network added dubbed languages like Czech, German and Hungarian.
By the way, Netflix’s Stranger Things and Squid Game are often cited as the most binged shows available to stream, along with HBOs Game of Thrones.
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