Volume Down, Subtitles On: 51% of Us Read Along With Our Favorite Shows
You're either a subtitles person or you're not. But increasingly, people are. Preply followed up(Opens in a new window) on its subtitle-use survey of Americans from 2022(Opens in a new window) and found a 5% rise, to 58%, in how many people use captioning more than they used to.
Now, just over half (51%) of those surveyed say they use subtitles most of the time. If you’re thinking this habit could be the purview of older folks who are having a hard time hearing—well, 96% of Gen Z survey respondents said they impose words over what they’re watching.
Netflix watchers are using captioning the most; 52% of survey respondents say they turn the feature on while they’re watching. Subtitles help 81% of people better comprehend what they’re watching. A significant part of the time (70%), people use subtitles to understand foreign accents, particularly if a speaker is Scottish, which poses a problem for Outlander fans.
Preply found that Americans have a hard time understanding their own language when someone has a Scottish accent (47%), an Irish accent (20%), a British accent (13%), a South African accent (12%), an Australian accent (5%), and even a Southern US accent (3%). So those who watching Derry Girls, Downton Abbey, and Ozark are adjusting their settings to follow along.
Background music is a reason 61% of viewers give for not being able to hear dialogue in shows and movies, along with muddled audio (15%). And a lot of streaming content was either created for theater speakers or mixed to fit the varying specs between streamers(Opens in a new window). Adding to the problem: the variations in television and tablet speakers.
Finally, a quarter of those who turn on subtitles do so because a specific actor is hard to
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