Subtitles on demand – our progress so far

In May we announced our plans to improve the availability of subtitles for on demand services. I’m pleased to say that we have reached our first big milestone on this journey and are on track to deliver against our commitments.

Earlier in the summer, our teams completed the technical work required to allow us to deliver on demand content with subtitles, and we’ve trialled the service with our customers. We’re grateful that Action on Hearing Loss were able to support us by inviting 40 people with hearing loss to be part of our trial community, giving us  invaluable feedback, and helping us to make sure the service is ready for launch.

Alongside setting up the technical requirements and testing the platform, we have invested in the team that creates and uploads the subtitled files to our system. The majority of this preparation involves a manual process and our newly expanded team have been busy readying some of our customers’ favourite TV shows and movies.

Thanks to the hard work of our people across these areas, on both the Sky+ and the Sky Q set top boxes, we now have hundreds of hours of our top movies and most popular boxsets with subtitles. This includes Spectre, Harry Potter, The Martian, Grey’s Anatomy, The Wire, Modern Family and much more. Over the coming months our team will continue working towards our target of subtitling at least 80 per cent of Sky on demand content, prioritising preparing and publishing our best and most popular boxsets and movies.

To help customers find subtitled on demand content as our library grows, we've introduced a ‘subtitled’ category, available within the Sky Cinema and Sky Box Sets sections on both Sky+ and Sky Q.

In May we also announced our plan to make subtitles available on NOW TV, our contract-free online streaming service, by the end of the year. Since then, NOW TV has launched a new smart box with subtitles available on live terrestrial channels and the individual channels’ players and we’re making good progress on introducing subtitled on demand content. The Sky Go and Sky Q apps will follow soon after in 2017.

We look forward to hearing what you think about our new subtitled section and we’ll keep you updated on our progress as our library of subtitled content grows and the rest of our plans develop. It’s all designed to make the Sky experience more accessible to our customers.

For more information on how to find on demand Sky Movies and Box Sets with subtitles, please visit TV Help on our  accessibility website. For more information about what we’re doing to make sure all of our customers can enjoy our services please visit our Bigger Picture website.