deanfranklin.net

I purchased Save The Green Planet* from Amazon Unbox last night. When I started watching it on my Tivo I was surprised to find that there were no English subtitles. I knew the movie was from South Korea but I had looked at the DVD version before buying from Unbox and I knew that it had English subtitles.

Thinking the problem was somehow related to Tivo I downloaded the movie to my PC but had the same problem. After trying in vain to find out what I was doing wrong or what the problem was on my end I found an entry in the Unbox FAQ that addressed my problem – Unbox does not support subtitles or closed captioning but they hope to offer it real soon now.

I wrote Amazon to complain about this problem today and received a reasonably quick response:

Greetings from Amazon.com

I sincerely apologize for the problem you encountered with Save The Green Planet. As a standard policy, Amazon Unbox videos are not returnable once the order has been placed.

However, because of the circumstances I have made an exception and issued a refund for $9.99. This refund should go through within the next 2 to 3 business days and will appear as a credit on your next credit card billing statement.

As part of the return/refund process, I have also revoked the license for this video. It will no longer appear in Your Media Library and you will be unable to play any copies you may have downloaded.

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com

I am happy that I received a refund, but I am disappointed that Amazon chooses not to explicitly disclose the absence of subtitles and closed captioning clearly and explicitly on their Unbox purchase page. Instead they bury that disclosure on a FAQ page that few customers would bother to look for until after they have problems. They appear to be addressing the issue, but in a slow and inefficient way and only for foreign language films. For example, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg** explicitly states French Language, No Subtitles in the title of the movie on the Unbox purchase page. I assume that when they get around to it that Save The Green Planet will have the same warning added to its title. But how many other foreign language movies are available on Unbox without the warning? Even if all the foreign language film listings are corrected there is still the issue of a lack of closed captioning for the hearing impaired. How many people have purchased movies from Unbox expecting subtitles or closed captioning? How many people did not get a refund from Amazon because they didn’t complain, or because Amazon would not make an exception to their standard Unbox “no refund” policy? If you are one of these people write to Amazon. Complain. Demand refunds. And most importantly ask them to fix the problem or make it clear before purchasing that subtitles and closed captioning are not available from Unbox.

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* No, we are not going to discuss my taste in movies. But anyway I haven’t seen it yet and I don’t know if I will like it.

** I think this is a very good movie. But please don’t tell any of my redneck friends.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Art, Movies, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.