I'm watching a rare new episode of Friday Night Lights and I'm distracted by a relatively small graphic in the lower left screen which is the NBC logo with the Olympic rings beneath it and above it the text "AMERICAN GLADIATORS Sunday 9/8c". It was on the screen for a full 5 minutes. Admittedly it a muted white but just before it settled on this, it was a full color graphic that took up the lower left half of the screen before animating into this. I've seen a lot worse, things I would call mini commercials filling the lower third of a screen with their own sound over a TV show.
So here's my thought. This things are (by definition) noticeable and in most cases annoying. Foreign films (and shows) don't do well here supposedly because Americans are annoyed by (or incapable of) reading subtitles. I wonder if all the logo bugs, news tickers, crawlers, and other superimposed on-screen graphics, could boose subtitle reading. If you're used to be bombarded with this crap, how difficult is it to cope with reading dialog of a good foreign film?
Yeah I don't think so either, but it should be.
2 comments:
We've found that more often than not these days, we turn on subtitles when watching a DVD. We just finished watching Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix, and turned it on for that. Otherwise we'd only be able to understand about a third of what was said. Plus, since the only time we can watch films is when the kids are asleep, we have to have the volume down a bit so subtitles allow for that. I guess we're the prime market for this new form of annoyvertising.
I've done the same thing. You might consider a better center channel speaker or boosting the output of it compared to the other speakers.
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