People are reading what they watch.
For generations, subtitles and closed captions were almost exclusively used by the hard of hearing or when heading to an art-house cinema to view foreign-language flicks.
Almost overnight, that changed.
Thanks to the expansion of streaming platforms, how people watch television has evolved as much as where they watch it.
And an unexpected trend has emerged: Viewers are watching everything with the captions turned on.
According to the UK captioning company Stagetext, 80% of people aged 18-25 “use subtitles all or part of the time.”
It’s a generational shift in which young people with no hearing problems are more likely to use subtitles than their parents or grandparents who may actually need them on a functional level.
Indeed, according to Stagetext, only a quarter of viewers aged 56-75 are turning on the words.
Those statistics have been affirmed by other studies.
The company Preply surveyed 1,200 Americans and half said they use subtitles or captions most of the time.
And, again, that massive generation gap remains strong: Preply reports that 70% of Gen Z respondents say they rely on captions most of the time compared to only 35% of Baby Boomers.
In the age of billion-dollar movies like “Barbie,” captioning still remains relatively modest in size. But it’s growing.
In 2021, the global captioning and subtitles market was valued at just under $300 million, according to the data tracker Valuates Reports, and is expected to jump to nearly $500 million by 2028 as the industry expands by nearly 10 percent each year.
The actual labor of creating captions remains fragmented and unformalized.
Some producers handle the captions themselves. In other cases, reports The Hollywood Reporter, leading subtitle companies like Rev rely on thousands of freelancers around the world, paid per minute of runtime with higher rates for more complex programming.
As Doug Karlovits, General Manager of leading captions company VITAC says, “whereas before our number one viewer request was to “turn captions off,” but we’re now seeing people asking how to turn them on.”
Like so many cultural shifts, the surge in use of subtitles has emerged from multiple interconnecting trends.
First and foremost, young people have grown up far more accustomed to words on screens than their parents, whether it’s the success of a foreign-language film like “Parasite,” captions over TikToks or words on their favorite YouTube video.
They’re also used to watching things on small screens like smartphones and tablets, often with mediocre sound quality that necessitates subtitles to follow the action. “People are consuming video everywhere nowadays, using mobile devices on the go,” says Sean Zdenek, author of “Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture.” “Captions are perfect for times when the environment is too loud, or it’s not appropriate to turn the sound on.”
Sometimes the sound being on doesn’t help enough.
The aforementioned Preply survey cited muddled audio as the top reason viewers opt for captioning and it’s not just because people are watching shows on tablets and phones.
Onnalee Blank, Emmy-winning sound mixer for “Game of Thrones” spoke to The Atlantic, explaining that levels of loudness – or soundness “specs” – used to be tied to dialogue, creating an industry standard for years of televised entertainment.
But the streaming companies that took over haven’t followed that same standard – and this has made it harder to understand what characters are saying.
As Devin Gordon writes in The Atlantic, “According to Blank, “Game of Thrones” sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it.
Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.”
The result: Hit programs are harder to hear and harder to follow.
Whether it’s the labyrinthine plot of something like “Westworld,” the many characters to track in “Game of Thrones,” or the thick accents of something like “Peaky Blinders,” viewers are turning on captions just to keep track of what’s going on.
“If you want to understand what someone is saying—but they are mumbling their lines or speaking with a thick accent—subtitles are the perfect solution,” adds Zdenek. “Movies with large casts (overlapping dialogue), complex plots, fantasy locations, or strange character names — it’s just easier, I think, for viewers to read proper nouns instead of puzzle over what someone is saying.”
But there’s more to it than bad audio and overstuffed narratives.
Streaming companies like Netflix and Hulu have thrived on programming that can be watched by people with a phone in their hand.
“Since young people often watch while checking their phones, they are . . . less concerned with full immersion,” says Mary McNamara, TV and culture critic for the Los Angeles Times. “It’s part of a larger cultural shift toward constant multitasking.” And captions help make this possible.
Young viewers are also more interested in shows and films in other languages than their parents.
Two of Netflix’s biggest hits have been in Korean (“Squid Game”) and Spanish (“Narcos”), and their viewers likely got subscribers accustomed to watching hit dramas with words on the bottom of the screen. “Squid Game” alone was streamed for a record 1.65 billion hours in its first four weeks of release.
“Younger audiences, who came of age watching a lot of international content on Netflix, are not bothered at all by subtitles in the way previous generations were,” notes McNamara. “They are also exposed to films and series in which characters have many more regional and international accents, which can often be difficult to understand.”
There may even be an intellectual comfort of sorts for some viewers in the concept of captions.
Way back in 2017, Rebecca Farley wrote a piece on Refinery29 titled “Get Over Your Fear of Subtitles, Please.” She argues that subtitles don’t distract but enhance the experience, allowing viewers to catch details they might miss. It certainly seems like a greater appreciation for a script could arise from reading it on-screen. There’s an art to them. McNamara’s daughter compared them to “seeing a book come to life even as you are reading it.”
The streamers are embracing these possibilities.
In 2009, only about 4% of the Hulu catalog was available with captions.
Just seven years later, the company committed to captioning 100% of their English and Spanish content. Netflix has a similar commitment.
It’s become more than merely functional.
In July 2022, Netflix ran an interview with Jeff T. and Karli Webster, the leaders of the team behind the subtitles on “Stranger Things,” about how seriously they took the project.
They recognize how subtitles can be both a need for the hard of hearing audience and something that enhances the experience for everyone. It’s more than just describing the action.
“We strive for evocative,” says Jeff T. “We strive for precise. And we also strive for concise.”
Two questions naturally arise around where this growing industry sector will ultimately take viewers.
One is the key issue that’s hovering over every creative in the world right now — How will captioning be impacted by AI? Machine learning will certainly be a part of it and AI-driven auto-captioning is already prevalent. “It is a driving force in allowing more content to be captioned,” says Karlovits of VITAC. “We use technology to help them get even better . . . [but] human captioners play an important role today and will continue to play an important role in future.”
For the moment, AI can only do part of the captioning job and may not always do it well.
Still, says McNamara, echoing prevailing Hollywood sentiment, “obviously, the use of AI will mean the loss of jobs —which is its main purpose in the creative fields — and, potentially, a [loss of] the greater understanding of scripting, which could lead to bigger problems.
Captioning, like dubbing, is always problematic when it comes to translation — I know enough French to notice when the captioning offers the basic information but not the nuance.”
The other question to consider is if captioning and subtitles could become a part of the creative vision from the beginning.
Will TV showrunners leave room in their framing with an understanding that the dialogue and action will take up some of their visual space?
Zdenek, for one, hopes so. “Captioning is an art . . . and has historically been treated as an afterthought, a task to be assigned to a third party at a low cost and with no input or interest from the creative team.” But baking in captioning from inception would not only enhance the captioning, but the entire production experience. “I would love to see creatives making room for captions much earlier, for captioners to be involved in the creative process itself, and for creatives to be involved in captioning.”
Zdenek has even written a piece that imagines captioning as a design art, something that could be built into the production process.
Enhanced captioning with different fonts, integration into the frame, and animation could merge art form and function even further in the future. Glued to their smartphones, young people will be watching. And, of course, reading.
Brian Tallerico is the managing editor of RogerEbert.com and president of the Chicago Film Critics Association.
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