Ask HN: Why are Closed Captions so neglected by Netflix et al.?

2 pointsSamineDylah1y ago3 comments

Errors abound - Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, weird punctuation artifacts (e.g. double quotes and single quotes redundantly used together), ascii symbol accidentally inserted, etc.

I know why closed captions on Amazon Prime, are technically poor (auto generated. under-funded, etc.).

But why are they so neglected by the media streaming giants in a business sense?

It is an offense to the hearing impaired.

It is transparent that they care little about accessibility.

It looks unprofessional.

Many people have subtitles on even if not hard of hearing. We see this terrible quality. It undermines the aesthetic beauty of the media.

So much time is spent on the shoot, the cinematography, staging, lighting, colors, angles, acting, editing. Hundreds of millions of dollars on a film, then failure to spend $1k on final proofreading/testing. Why undermine it with a stupid mistake ('ins' instead of 'in').

The answer can't simply be 'cross platform compatibility issues' because it doesn't explain the spelling mistakes, or the fact that these issues occur across multiple browsers/platforms that each have billions of users.

3 comments

jfengel1y ago

Remember that Netflix only needs to keep you subscribing. They don't want to spend more than they have to. If you were canceling your subscription, they'd change something. If not, they're perfectly happy with your money.

They do a lot of subtitles -- as many as a dozen, for each property. And they have a lot of content. They've clearly optimized the process for producing a lot of good-enough subtitles.

Adding $1k to each of those would be a lot of money. It's a little surprising that there's nobody pushing harder to get it done right on their prestige content, but the subtitling department is probably quite swamped with work as it is.

WheelsAtLarge1y ago

It's an expense they rather not have and not enough people complain about the quality. It's also an after thought, not a part of the original production. If you think those are bad, take a look at the real time ones that are transcribed during live events. They are almost impossible to follow. I can hear but I like to keep them on because I sometime mishear but I feel for those that can't hear. It's a mess.

SamineDylahOP1y ago

Agree.

> It's an expense they rather not have and not enough people complain about the quality

My argument is that there is a positive ROI to this expense that should be apparent to these businesses, despite those benefits being intangible and not being immediate profit.

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