Closed Captioning is a Must

by Rian

For the life of me, I do not know why YouTube still doesn’t officially support closed captioning on PiP. As much as I appreciate overall better audio qualities even from a beginner YouTuber, the problem stands. Unless I am watching a podcast video uploaded onto YouTube, a video of people talking in perfectly sterilized studio, there is bound to be some background noises, some other audios mixing in. It’s only natural, even big time Hollywood movies and TV shows suffer from it. The difference I am pointing out is how these platforms handle the problem. Of which, YouTube is slowly adopting machine-generated captions.

While I was cataloguing my media library, one thing peeked my interests. Some of the older DVDs I own, I bought them in South Korea with Korean dubs and subs. I was curious if there is a streaming platform geared toward that — think of Netflix and/or Disney+ but for 90s films and TV shows. I won’t name names, but I was devastated to learn about Korean streaming landscapes. It was either a. use cable box and the cable company’s app, or b. use a third-party aggregator may not even have the full seasons.

The supposed native streaming services were hilarious on this regard. They listed dubs and subs separately, because of licensing. You can’t change subtitle fonts, locations, and size, because licensing. The hard-coded subs cannot be turned off nor will they provide one without, because licensing. I suppose they had to list each season, and each dub and sub as an independent series, because of licensing. If the streaming service offers nothing to make home theater smoother, I wonder why should anyone stream it from them.

Side note, these hard-coded subtitles don’t have the usual SDH with environmental cues. I’m not entirely familiar with how Korean broadcasting and/or media laws work in these areas, it would simply be illegal not to provide a proper SDH on streaming platforms. There are lawsuits, time and time again, against the streaming giants in North America. I don’t know if the law in South Korea hasn’t caught up to streaming yet, or if they are playing a hard ball. But my take on CC is: more choice for the user is always the better.