When Francois Beaulieu pressed “2” to choose to host Netflix in French over the phone last Saturday, everything was fine. When we answered him in English, he changed the tune.
“The employee who answered me told me that if I absolutely want to get the service in French, I have to call during the week, because it’s France that cares,” says the 56-year-old.
Upset, follow everything in English. His router problem has been fixed in no time.
“You’re in Quebec, you’re selling subscriptions, you have to serve us in French,” Pouliot tells Netflix.
Newspaper Ten times tried to contact the company to find out more. The American giant gave us no answer, let alone an explanation.
Time difference
So we called customer service directly on a weekday morning. After pressing 2, a French man asked us how he could help us.
An employee of the multinational company explained that he was in France, without specifying his location. He said the Netflix call center is open Monday through Friday, from 9am to 3am. This means Quebeckers can speak to a representative in French from 3 AM to 9 PM.
Except for Saturday and Sunday, as noted by Francois Beaulieu.
“I didn’t pay for it!” He insists.
An extremely enigmatic giant
Historically, Netflix does not disclose the number of subscribers to its service.
However, we know that among French speakers between the ages of 16 and 64 in Canada, 52.7% are customers of the company, according to a recent report by the Canadian Media Fund, which is based on numbers from GlobalWebIndex.
In this age group, Quebec had 5,335,000 people in 2016. So we can estimate the number of Quebec Netflix customers whose first language is French to be more or less than 2 million.
The company is also not transparent about the promise it made in 2017 to invest $ 500 million in “Canadian content” over the next few years.
If the American giant swears it has invested the amount, it is very difficult to know how to spend the money. Even the company and CRTC don’t agree on the standards that define local content.
To date, the only Quebec movie produced by Netflix and available online is Even regression, Whose budget was about $ 5 million.
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