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Anonymous User
Not applicable

Subtitles/closed captions not working properly

The subtitles on NowTV have never been great, but after a recent update of the NowTV Player they're absolutely awful.

 

They'll show a single line of speech frozen on the screen for 5 minutes, before showing another single line and cutting out again. Obviously this is just as useless as no subtitles at all - and from a quick scan of the forums I'm not the only person experiencing issues with rubbish captioning.

 

If NowTV is actively trying to drive away its deaf and hard of hearing customers, it's going the right way about it.

91 REPLIES 91
RoyB
Legend

@Anonymous User 

 

I am dismissive of people whose response to an unsatisfactory situation is to suggest disrupting NowTV’s operations by spamming them; how do you stand on this issue?

 

(Clue: the last person who tried this has been summarily banned from the Community).

 

I am not dismissive of problems with subtitles; for ourselves, we could not watch Season 1 of Westworld in the pre-subtitles days, as the sound was so bad we couldn’t hear it.

 

And while I can normally manage without them, my wife requires them, so subtitles are important to us.

 

In fact the whole thing that got me started on this Community was complaining that the Subtitles option in the Settings of the NowTV stick was ineffective; even with it On, you still had to turn them on programme by programme, if you wanted them on.

 

I’m pleased to say this is finally fixed, but I’m still around.

 

So we watch a lot of NowTV, with subtitles, on NowTV Sticks, a Roku Stick, native apps on our Samsung TV; we get the odd problem, like once on Succession the subtitles didn’t arrive until a couple of days past the programme airing, so we had to wait to watch it. But nothing like what’s described above.

 

Which is not to say it isn’t happening the way people describe, and it’s very personal to them, but it’s not general. So it’s hard from me to look at for other people. And the above thread is an aggregation of different subtitle issues, on different devices, not one coherent whole.

 

And you do seem to have been extremely unlucky, in a way I am almost mystified by, except that I’ve seen comparable reports in other Communities, like the guy who went through five YouView boxes....

 

Not that all my NowTV watching is straightforward of course; a couple of times, Safari on this iPad has seemingly decided that it is a Mac, as far as NowTV goes, and declined to play it, in a very strange way. But Chrome is unaffected.

 

And I’ve never seen anyone else report it, and I’ve never been able to dig into it; but it’s indicative of the weird 💩that NowTV can pull on people, in this and a million other ways.

 

So it’s quite a relief when we get some issue that happens to everyone, or at least to a defined group of people, e.g. LG TV owners.

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.
Anonymous User
Not applicable

It's so weird but for me the subtitles only work when watching through my Playstation 4 NOW TV app! I'm not sure about the Android app but they definitely don't work on my laptop.

What is even more weird is that I noticed that the subtitles work well on my laptop for one of the latest tv shows ("The 3rd day", has anyone tried this?), which gave me hope that the issue has been resolved. But then I switched to "Watchmen" and same issue with the subtitles again.

Anonymous User
Not applicable
As I've been given a month of Entertainment free I tried 'The 3rd Day'
briefly as you suggested, they look fine - one can only hope they've fixed
the issue on new titles?

Sadly Band of Brothers (my go to subtitles test!) is still u/s on PS4,
Win10, Win8, Win 7, Android tablet, Macbook and ipad.
Anonymous User
Not applicable

Yeap I just watched the third episode of The 3rd Day and the subtitles were working perfect (laptop). It's so weird that this is the only show that the subtitles seem to work on all devices.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Just an update. I watched another one of the most recently added tv series, Brave New World, using the laptop NOW TV player software and the subtitles were fine, no problem at all! However, I have tried other recent shows, such as Two weeks to live, and same known problems as usual...

Anonymous User
Not applicable

subtitles not working good for me,i won`t renew

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Customer service say that they are aware of the issue in Windows and Apple, that they are working on it, and this was initially raised more than a year ago!!!

Anonymous User
Not applicable
As long as its just Windows and Apple that has problems, eh!? ;D
Anonymous User
Not applicable

I checked older posts and I could find complaints about the subtitles since 2016...

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Very frustrating!! They either dont have the appetite to fix it, or the knowledge. It would be good to email the CEO, one if those things that never make it to the big fish up there in their hierarchy, otherwise the CEO would t be very happy, this is costing them customers and reputation!