I’ve found that when it comes to Apple, it’s sometimes the small things that have the biggest impact, and as I recently discovered, the company made a change to Apple TV+ a while ago that seems so obvious, I don’t get why everyone doesn’t immediately copy it.
Apple TV’s Streaming Service Temporarily Turns On Subtitles When You Skip Back
OK, let’s dispense with the needless anticipation. As the heading above says, this feature simply turns on the subtitles if you press the rewind button a few times to skip back in the movie or show.
Now, this was implemented in 2024 already, and I watch Apple TV+ regularly, but I’m not someone who tends to skip back a few seconds, so I only noticed this feature when my wife had the remote control as we were watching the brilliant Severance. I’ve learned to live with missing what someone just said and that I’ll figure it out in a minute anyway, but she’s loathe to miss any details, and so I noticed the subs coming on. “Did you turn the subtitles on?” I asked, but as we soon realized this was happening automatically.
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Inaudible Dialogue Is the Scourge of Modern TV
It’s been a few years since I tackled the issues with modern dialog mixing and, sadly, things haven’t really improved with later movies and shows. With some tweaking of your audio settings, such as dialog enhancement on your soundbar or night mode on your TV, you can improve things, but by and large, people are turning to subtitles just to know what characters say.
This Is a Smart Way to Anticipate Why Most of Us Rewind Shows
Apple’s real brilliance here is that there are only a few reasons you’d rewind 10-20 seconds. Either you missed something visually, or you missed what someone just said.
The problem is that, even if you do rewind and listen again, chances are you’ll still be unable to make out what the character is mumbling during an apparent hurricane. Which means we all turn the subtitles on anyway. This small feature saves on frustration, and it gets out of the way if you don’t need it anymore.
That said, since this problem exists with Apple’s own original content, you’d think the company could just fix its audio mixes, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.
There’s Also a Double Dialog Enhancement Feature
While checking out the options in the Apple TV app on my, er, Apple TV box, I also noticed that there are now dialog-enhancing options in the sound settings. You can choose between two levels of enhancement, though the highest level severely suppresses all the other sounds in the show or movie, and I don’t recommend it unless you’re really hard of hearing, or you need to watch at night and can’t have any of that music or loud explosions waking up the neighbors.
Of course, I personally just use my AirPods with my Apple TV most of the time, which is why I rarely need to mess with settings to hear dialog properly. That’s my first-line solution, and you can even use two sets of headphones at once with many modern streaming boxes.
I Want These Tweaks on Every Service Now
While other streaming services have included dialog-enhancing features, I think this simple subtitle tweak might be one of the most effective solutions I’ve seen, barring fixing the actual audio mixes of course. It should also be very simple to implement. So here’s hoping that every streaming service gives us a little automatic help when we skip back to hear what the heck Bane from Batman just said.
