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Visualizing Why Americans Increasingly Need Subtitles For TV Shows And Movies

"What did they say? What was that? Oh, now I have to turn on subtitles again, hold on, where is the button for that?"

7 months ago · 48.9k reads ·

Looking at recent popular entertainment hits, as well as each generation's consumption of media, reveals that audio is getting worse and people are leaning on subtitles to understand their TV shows and movies. It seems as though technology is getting better at giving us surround sound and noise-canceling headphones, but studios are getting worse at mixing sound. Or actors are just mumbling more?

Preply surveyed Americans on their habits and opinions around subtitles, and uncovered some very interesting data concerning their rise in popularity.

Key Findings:

Just over half of people surveyed, 51 percent, use subtitles most of the time when watching shows or films.
Fifty eight percent of viewers are using subtitles more often than they used to — an increase of five percent since 2022.
One in four survey participants say they have subtitles turned on all the time for everything — particularly by Gen Z, who use subtitles 96 percent of the time.
Sixty-one percent of people say that background music makes it harder to hear dialogue.
Seventy percent use subtitles to better understand non-American actors with accents. This is probably why Netflix's "The Crown" is the TV show Americans find hardest to understand, narrowly beating out shows like "Bridgerton" and "Ted Lasso" which also have lots of Brits in them.
Mikayla Nogueira is the hardest TikTok creator for Americans to understand.

Click to enlarge images

Via Preply.

[Image credit: YouTube]

Comments

Unknown 7 months ago

For how necessary they’ve become due to atrocious sound mixing, a lack of interest in ADR fixes, or stylistic choices, the thing that gets on my nerves the most is how so many streaming services have the absolute worst caption overlays. Apples are pretty good. Disney’s are ok. Amazon’s are customizable, but can be off sometimes. Most of the rest are the laziest shit possible.
Dennis Slater (Mosey... 7 months ago

Mumbling actors and mumbling singers. No one, singers or actors, bother to pronounce words so that they can be understood. Listen to a Frank Sinatra song and tell me if you cannot understand every word he sings. Watch an old movie (
Vic Glassley 7 months ago

For me it's the background music. Seems like it used to be just on with the dramatic parts or scary parts, now it seems like the music is in just about the whole movie/show. I'm sure my age has become worse over the years, but I don't think that's a big part of the problem. I use subtitles / CC on just about everything anymore.
MarsFKA 7 months ago

Mumbling actors do it for me – it's standard acting procedure now. I'm constantly adjusting the volume up to catch what they're saying, then hurriedly down to avoid being overwhelmed by the music or background noises – I watched "Matrix Resurrections" on Netflix last night and was on the bloody volume button all night.
Why can't Directors tell their casts to speak properly? I watched "Casablanca" a week ago – for the first time in fifty-eight years and never touched the volume button once.
Xavier 7 months ago

That seems right for Rick and Morty to be one of the hardest shows to understand, there IS a lot of alien language spoken ;)
Brianx Wall 7 months ago

I'm a Brit and usually need subtitles for American TV or movies. I used to be a TV studio sound engineer so judge that studios today are too focused on getting good sound escapes rather than clear audio. The technogy has progressed since my day but not the principles.

I speak English but live in Spain. European TV is multinational often with characters talking in their own language, so a scene might include Spanish, German and French dialogue. I therefore have subtitles on a anyway, but certainly the dialogue is technically far clearer than USA stuff.

Finally there are the overhyped method actors who actually think mumbling is "artistic" or realistic. No TV or movie is That realistic!

Audiances vote with their feet like they did a decade ago when camermen thought that waving a handheld camera around added to the realism of shows. It made viewers seasick and thankfully the stupid fad passed.
Rob Henerey 7 months ago

At 77 I'm hard of hearing anyway, so I use subtitles AND headphones for most media. Somehow I don't need the captions for sports and news. They do still help but aren't worth the space.