Hi Khan,
Yes, economic dimensions are often key, and it’s clear that in my case, and in Hanna’s (see my reply to her comment), sadly the money isn’t there in terms of worldwide distribution of films in multiple languages for culture industry players. In this case, once again, profit concerns limit consumer choice rather than increase it.

An interesting case of illustrating the myth of interconnected global flow of information and language learning. It is often said that the economic dimension is perhaps the most important aspect of language learning but it is more than that.

Khan

Thanks for this blog- I have been facing exactly the same problem in Australia with an extra hurdle: Amazon.de won’t send films to me at all! I’ve tried to buy a few DVDs and had the response that my region cannot buy these DVDs due to copyright restrictions. A kind friend from Germany sent us a bunch of DVDs which is great – but I share your frustration with wanting VOD. Let’s hope it’s only a matter of time before someone sees that there is an economic opportunity here and the situation becomes truly global in terms of buying multilingual media content.

And let’s also have sympathy for those who want multimedia content in languages not as globally powerful as German. Last year I tired to buy some books in Burmese for a refugee network and was told by Sydney’s biggest foreign language bookshop that the only Burmese language books they could order were dictionaries. Some languages are of course, more foreign than others.

Best,
Hanna