Is the quality of television subtitles in the UK declining? There are certainly still significant problems with live subtitles, despite a range of improvements that were introduced around 12 years ago. However, some of those improvements are now the cause of problems, such as subtitles arriving early, or many tens of seconds late. Another problem is that broadcasters are reusing a significant amount of archive programming with their original subtitles which are often heavily edited, somthing that would be unacceptable today. As one of a number of industry insiders who is noticing these problems I set out to try and quantify the issues.
The result is a proof of concept system which takes in a TV recording including the subtitles and uses speech-to-text to quantify timing and word loss in the recording. The system is successfully detecting incidents where the timing of the subtitles is well out of sync with the programme along with cases where the subtitles lack half the spoken words. It can be used to perform 24/7 monitoring of a TV channel, providing information about patterns of quality failure over time. Some of the results have been passed on to the broadcasters concerned and there are signs of improvement in recent months.
I have written up my initial work in a paper presented at IBC2025 and you can view the paper and slides here.
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