One of my greatest and most long-running frustrations with cultural content, especially with movies and television, has been the lack of language options offered for this content. In theory, with the advent of the DVD in 1990s, it became possible to easily encode countless language options for films for the consumer.
This did NOT happen, thanks mostly to a still-in-place and archaic and infuriatingly restrictive region encoding system that ensured that consumers in one place, for instance, in the United States, would NOT have access to filmic content dubbed into languages other than, for the most part, Spanish.
In my long-term quest to raise both of my daughters, now 14 and 16 respectively, as English-German bilinguals, I bought a region-free DVD player in 2004 — the year my oldest daughter was born — and immediately began ordering large numbers of DVDs from Amazon.de (Amazon Germany) to ensure that we had a good library of mostly, but not only, American-made films (Pixar, Disney, etc.) that we could consume in German. Our DVD library eventually hit several hundred DVDs, all of these sent to us “illegally” by Amazon.de — illegally because, technically, there is a warning at the very beginning when you play each of these DVDs that it is “illegal” to purchase them from a region in which you are not living and play them on a DVD player not located in that region 🙄!
