Subtitling “weak or non-existent” in Silverlight??

I read something this morning on the Netflix blog that surprised me:

Captioning is in our development plans but is about a year away. [...] Unfortunately, the tools for rendering SAMI files in Silverlight…are weak or non-existent, and there is some technology development required.

For English titles in foreign films, Netflix burns the text into the video stream (i.e. they can never be removed). Apparently it takes “about 500 processor-months to make one encode through the entire library,” so doing this for every language would take forever and cost a fortune. Not to mention file management nightmares and the fact that when they can support proper subtitling these videos will be thrown away and require some fraction of “500 processor-months” to replace.

Subtitles have been supported in Flash video for years using FLV cue points and XML (among other techniques). In Flash you can very easily caption a single movie in dozens of languages. Many of our Flix Engine and Flix Pro customers do it every day.