Can’t Find Captioned Netflix Movies? Phlixie to the Rescue

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Nanci Linke-Ellis of Captionfish recently explained about a new captioned entertainment search service now being provided by Phlixie to help you find captioned movies on Netflix. She wrote:

When Captionfish was created, it simplified the task of finding captioned entertainment at public venues everywhere.

[Ed. note: I last wrote about Captionfish back in May 11, 2010. Also note: Captionfish is shutting down on December 31, 2014.]

Now we have a different kind of challenge—finding captioned titles online from different content providers and being able to sort out where and how they will work.

To provide a solution, Chris Sano and Brendan Gramer put together Phlixie. Phlixie is an easy way to find captioned titles on Netflix. Even though Netflix improved their online captioning, they haven’t improved the method of how to find these captioned titles. Thus subtitled movies get lost in their library. That’s where Phlixie comes in.

Over time, we plan/hope to expand this service to include Hulu, iTunes, captioned Web Series, etc.

This is an early development release because we pushed to get this out the door quickly so it’s not all together yet. Now we’ll focus on improving the application itself, artwork, design, and new features (like Play/Add to Queue buttons, View by Movie Poster, etc). We’ve got lots of ideas and are now deciding which features to put in a roadmap.

We’re always looking for feedback and feature requests so if you think there’s a better way to do things, let us know!

The Phlixie website explains that Phlixie provides you with a simple way to traverse all of the available accessible titles in Netflix’s Instant library. It further explains that by accessible titles it means those titles that are available with English subtitles. This includes titles that content providers have made subtitles available for, and all foreign films that are available with English subtitles.

Phlixie is needed because Netflix still has a number of limitations such as:

• You can’t limit your searches to just subtitled movies.
• You can’t filter by genre.
• There’s no way to tell which titles were recently added, or which titles are
  expiring in the near future.
• When it comes to a TV series, you can’t tell which episodes have subtitles and which don’t.

The good news is that Phlixie addresses all of the above. So if you are into Netflix movies, give Phlixie a try.
_________________

Note: Unfortunately, Phlixie shut down around the end of December, 2012 so it no longer exists.