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Rosella Brain
My parents have a Smart TV and use Direct TV. They use closed captioning, as, at 87 years old, sometimes they have difficulty hearing. They are able to change the font size in the regular TV shows they watch and on Netflix, but we are having a hard time changing font size on Amazon Prime. Have followed Amazon directions but the font size is still the same size on TV.
As someone who sometimes has trouble hearing what characters in my favorite shows are saying, I get where ssmtmb's parents are coming from. So I was happy to try helping myself, using Amazon's posted instructions to figure out the solution to the problem. That's when I ran into a technical roadblock of my own.
I do most of my Amazon Prime Video watching on my 4th-generation Apple TV. And those instructions in the link above don't work with Apple's set-top box, as an Amazon spokesperson told me when I contacted the company to ask what I was doing wrong. (The relationship between Apple and Amazon when it comes to streaming video is ... complex.)
Fortunately, that same Amazon spokesperson provided some more detailed steps on how to adjust the closed-caption sizes for Amazon Prime Video that, hopefully, will help ssmtmb's parents set the text to their liking:
1. On a computer that's signed in to your Amazon Prime account, go to the Subtitles Settings page, and customize the look of the captions. You can change the color, font and opacity for up to four presets.
If that doesn't work, and you're viewing Amazon Prime through an app built into your smart TV, you'll want to look through the settings on your TV. Here are instructions from LG, Sony, Hisense, TCL/Roku for finding the closed-captioning settings on their smart TVs.
But what about Apple TV users like me? (Remember, those steps won't work for us.) Apple offers closed-captioning customization features of its own that work across apps like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix:
4. You can make sure closed-captioning is turned on here, but you can also click on Style, which lets you select from four presets or edit your own. However, if you just want bigger closed captions, the Large Text preset will do the trick.
As ssmtmb's parents discovered, adjusting the closed-captioning is much more straightforward on Netflix. The streaming service has a dedicated page outlining how to turn on subtitles for just about every device you can imagine. There are also instructions for customizing those captions depending on your device.
Hulu offers instructions for both its on-demand and live TV services. On connected devices, swipe up for info and settings when you're watching a show, and go to the Subtitles/Caption section to turn them on; you can customize the captions on most connected devices by going to the Account menu from Hulu's homepage, choosing Settings and then selecting Subtitles & Captions. On phones and tablets, Hulu suggests you change the caption size through your device's accessibility settings.
To get answers to your burning tech questions,head to the Tom's Guide Forum for the latest tips from our resident experts and fellow members. You can also comment on this article or email us directly at hel...@tomsguide.com.
Philip Michaels is a Managing Editor at Tom's Guide. He's been covering personal technology since 1999 and was in the building when Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone for the first time. He's been evaluating smartphones since that first iPhone debuted in 2007, and he's been following phone carriers and smartphone plans since 2015. He has strong opinions about Apple, the Oakland Athletics, old movies and proper butchery techniques. Follow him at @PhilipMichaels."}), " -0-11/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Philip MichaelsSocial Links NavigationPhilip Michaels is a Managing Editor at Tom's Guide. He's been covering personal technology since 1999 and was in the building when Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone for the first time. He's been evaluating smartphones since that first iPhone debuted in 2007, and he's been following phone carriers and smartphone plans since 2015. He has strong opinions about Apple, the Oakland Athletics, old movies and proper butchery techniques. Follow him at @PhilipMichaels.
How do we feel about this? I ask as a movie-watcher who subscribes to Netflix, Hulu and Fandor, and also rents online from Amazon and Vudu. iTunes gets none of my business because the iTunes Store has been misbehaving on my computer. I average three streaming movies a week and three or four on DVD. I'm not an average consumer, because a lot of my viewing is for work. But often of an evening I'll stream for pleasure. All of my streaming happens through a Roku Player on HDTV.
Does anyone recall the time when HBO was first test-marketing Movies on Demand? There was much hilarity when it was learned that their Florida test market wasn't exactly a model of digital automation. Apparently actual employees were taking telephone orders and then scrambling around to push movies into playback machines--on video cassettes, because DVDs hadn't been introduced.
These days the video quality of most movies is acceptable to excellent (for streaming, that is), assuming the films themselves come from good prints. Netflix and Fandor deliver flawless service, although my Hulu has occasionally been freezing, presumably for buffering, in the high-use evening hours. On the whole I'm a happy camper. The first streaming movie I saw online was an old B Western from Republic, and the image was the size of a postage stamp.
I buy DVDs when I need to. Recently, for example, I purchased Bela Tarr's "Satantango" from Facets Multimedia, because it absolutely is not available online. Many, many films are not. I find from instantwatcher.com, a site that monitors Netflix, that the most-watched titles are not likely to be by Bela Tarr. Their top five titles at this moment are "The Rum Diary," "Nude Nuns With Big Guns," "Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings," "The Patriot" and "Absinthe." Netflix has good depth, however, and every night before I turn in, I suggest a "daily streamer" on my Twitter and Facebook. Recent titles: "My Left Foot," "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," "Lost in Translation" "Merci Pour le Chocolat," "Still Walking," "French Cancan," "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2001), and "Pi." All of those are on Netflix Instant except for Renoir's "French Cancan," which is part of the Criterion Collection on Hulu, which bought the Criterion rights.
Because I wanted to suggest films from several different sources, I asked my Facebook "friends" how they felt about Hulu and Fandor. Many said Hulu was fine with them. Many didn't know about Fandor. The Hulu supporters were fibbing. I can tell from click counts that the vast majority of my FB folks use Netflix Instant, and that's it. Hulu draws barely 15% as many clicks, but of course most people use Hulu to stream TV, and by virtue of their excellence, Hulu's Criterion titles are less popular than "Nude Nuns With Big Guns." Nothing alarms some moviegoers more than the news that a movie is a masterpiece.
The companies which manufacture and distribute DVDs are in business to make a profit. They invest much of their income in the cost of restoring films, especially classics, so the DVD version usually has better visual quality than any 35mm print you're lucky enough to be able to see. If DVD sales decline, film restoration declines right along with them.
I was talking about this not long ago with an executive of a respected DVD label--never mind which one. He said Netflix was killing him. For years, when he released a new DVD title, he could count on a certain number of sales in three ways: (1) Direct mail or Amazon; (2) video stores; and (3) a bulk order from Netflix. Judging by the predicted sales, he could judge his costs and cover his overhead.
"Now what's happened," he said, "is that video stores are closing, because of streaming. Amazon sales are down because Amazon Instant streams a lot of titles. And people don't buy if they figure a movie will be streaming on Netflix. Previously, Netflix would buy a lot of titles to service their customers who got movies by mail. But with their price changes, they forced a lot of those customers to choose between mail and streaming. As a result, Netflix needs a lot fewer DVDs in order to be able to offer a title."
This is all obviously true. What does it mean for us? It means the day is coming when non-blockbuster titles will undergo a sudden income crisis. If you can sell between several hundred and a few thousand physical DVDs, you have a good chance of breaking even. If you have a Tiffany product like Criterion, you can afford the considerable costs of film restoration. When income dries up, those kinds of films become more challenging to manufacture and distribute.
Criterion seems to be fairly well-situated for now, because their customers love their beautiful prints, value the extras like commentary tracks and booklets, and enjoy building a collection. Because Criterion has always had excellent taste, it has preserved and made available countless films that were long completely unavailable. Would you believe that Hulu (which doesn't yet have every Criterion title) offers 222 films from Japan and 201 from France--two of the world's three great cinemas?
I know of a couple of companies that even now are releasing new DVDs of out-of-print movies. The Warner Archive regularly publishes back titles from their own catalog, in limited editions. And an enterprising company named Twilight Time buys the rights to publish 3,000 copies of unavailable titles ("When they're gone, they're gone!"). Many studios just aren't interested in those kinds of DVD sales; Warners matches Disney as the most adept at marketing old films.
All of this leads us by a meandering path to my final destination, Fandor.com. This is a streaming outlet that specializes in independent films, classics, silent films, foreign films, documentaries and shorts. Its site is rich with essays about directors, genres and film history. The comments are invariably well-written. And Fandor shares income 50/50 with independent filmmakers! That shows where its heart is.
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