> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.”
I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
The only video I've seen that uses the YouTube subtitle capabilities to their fullest, with animated subs etc is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM and even then you have to dig down into the settings cog and choose "English - Animated" manually
https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.
I think one of the biggest mistakes was not making WebVTT equivalent to Advanced SubStation Alpha (the format of Aegisub). That would have driven basically all the various streaming services to grow support for the things anime subbers have done for years.
> I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.
I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.
If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)
[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.
I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.