Subtitles and the best streaming services are a match made in heaven: Netflix says that nearly half of its viewing hours in the US happen with subtitles and captions on, and I can confirm that where my kids are concerned, it’s closer to 100%.
That’s great, but Netflix has identified a way to make it more useful for many viewers when watching one of the best Netflix movies or best Netflix shows: subtitles that only show the spoken dialogue.
The existing and very useful subtitle features aren’t going away. Rather, Netflix is just adding an extra option.
How Netflix’s new subtitles will work
At the moment, the subtitles you get on Netflix are designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. And that means the subtitles are for everything – so they’ll tell you if a phone is ringing, or if there are spooky sounds, or if there’s an explosion.
Those subtitles are of course staying, because they’re very important.
But subtitles can also be useful even if you don’t have hearing issues: think of the completely incomprehensible Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.
Some characters are hard to hear, and some movies’ and shows’ sound mixes don’t always make speech as loud as some of us would like.
Turning on the subtitles to avoid the “what did she say?” moments is handy for that, but it does mean we can get a lot of detail we don’t need. Think “(dramatic music plays)” or “(telephone rings)”.
From today, you’ll see a new option in the subtitles menu. It’ll only be available in You season 5 today, and it’s only for the English language options. But it’ll soon be much more widely available and will make its way to other languages too.
Now, when you go to Subtitles you’ll see two options for English language subtitles: English, and English (CC). English is purely for the spoken dialogue, and English (CC) gives you the whole shebang.
[Audience applauds].
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