I don’t know why Prime can’t make their subtitles work better. If you watch things with subtitles on Netflix, occasionally someone will say something and a subtitle for it won’t appear. It’s some sort of glitch — when this has happened when I’ve been watching things, if you rewind it and play the part it didn’t show you a subtitle for again, it always ends up showing you the subtitle. So Netflix has the subtitles for all of the dialogue but sometimes, especially when it’s a lightning fast conversation, a subtitle for a sentence or two won’t appear. But if you rewind it and watch that part again, the subtitle will show. At least that’s always been my experience. Of course, it’s annoying to have to rewind and watch part again just to get a subtitle but this only happens when I’m watching Netflix once or twice a week at most. And I watch a ton of subtitled stuff on there. GETTING TO MY POINT, with Prime, the subtitles are extremely difficult to follow. If someone says four sentences, sometimes no subtitles appear at first then all of a sudden it’ll show the subtitle for one sentence and immediately go to the second sentence then third the fourth — the issue being that subtitles don’t appear until AFTER the dialogue is said and when they do finally appear, it goes through four sentences one at a time extremely fast and it can be impossible to read them all. And this happens constantly with Prime. I watched something yesterday for an hour and a half and it must have happened eight times. The characters are talking and you don’t get any subtitles then suddenly they do appear but it shows one sentence at a time and it goes through them faster than you can read them.
Now, one might assume that these subtitle issues with Netflix and Prime are impossible to avoid. But I believe you would be mistaken. Why? Because I subscribe to Viki, a streaming service for shows from Asian countries. And with Viki, the subtitles work FLAWLESSLY. Whenever someone is saying something, the subtitle immediately appears. Nobody ever says anything without the subtitle appearing and it always appears right away when it’s supposed to. It’s weird because Netflix and Prime make way, way more money and you’d think they’d have the best technology, yet they still have these subtitle problems. And Viki does not.
I haven’t watched a ton of subtitled stuff on Max and Hulu, but when I have watched subtitled things on those they seemed to work without any glitches. So I don’t know why Netflix and Prime can’t make their subtitles work flawlessly. Netflix isn’t so bad because you can watch subtitled stuff on there all day and at the most the issue will happen twice. Some days you can watch subtitled stuff on there for 12 hours without any issues. So with Netflix the issue is somewhat forgivable. But the problem with Prime happens a dozen times if you watch a one hour show. Obviously, it’s not always a dozen times per hour, but in my experience that’s the average. And it’s especially annoying when you consider how expensive Prime is and how much money Amazon has. If VIki can make their subtitles work flawlessly, Prime should be able to do so, too. At the very least, Prime should improve things so their subtitles are at least as reliable as they are on Netflix. But they don’t seem motivated to fix anything. This issue with the subtitles on Prime has existed for years and I haven’t noticed any improvement.
Prime just drives me crazy because I’m watching a really suspenseful Korean serial killer thriller series called Mouse on there and it seems like every five minutes someone says something and the subtitles don’t appear until after they’re done talking and when they do appear, they flash across the screen faster than you can read them. And I’m good at reading subtitles. Almost everything I watch is subtitled, actually. So the problem is certainly not that I read too slow. The problem is that their system seems to fall behind then it shows a bunch of subtitles too fast to try to catch up.
It’s ridiculous because if you download movies and shows with subtitles and play them with Plex, the subtitles almost always work flawlessly. So if they want you to pay for Prime and watch things on there, they should resolve their damn subtitle issue. It’s pretty bad if you can get a better experience with subtitles by downloading something versus watching it on a streaming platform that you’re paying for.
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