Video Subtitles

How are subtitles attached to a video?

Two ways. Burned-in (hard) subtitles are rendered into the pixels of the video file; soft subtitles live in a separate file that the player draws on top. Soft subtitles are managed as text — SRT or VTT — so fixing a typo or adding a language never means re-exporting the video. Burned-in subtitles look identical in any player, but once they are baked in they cannot be changed. Captions generated live during a broadcast are soft subtitles; captions added afterwards to a replay or a clip are where you actually choose between the two.

Why does this matter more in commerce?

A large share of mobile viewers watch with the sound off. Without subtitles the product explanation simply does not land, and in short-form the decision to leave happens in the first few seconds, so the loss is immediate. Commerce video is also unusually dense: ingredients, sizing, order of use, discount conditions — details that break a purchase if misheard. When they pass by in speech alone, the viewer leaves the screen and searches again. Subtitles keep that moment inside your video.

What makes subtitles readable?

Strong contrast against the background, placement inside the lower safe area, and no more than two lines at a time. The bottom of the screen collides easily with UI buttons, so check on a real device. Two more habits prevent most failures. Put a semi-transparent plate or an outline behind the type — in a video that cuts between bright and dark scenes, colour alone cannot guarantee contrast. And watch dwell time: a line that advances too fast disappears mid-read, which is the same as not being there.

What changes when you localise them?

Length and proper nouns. Translation changes character count, and languages set in full-width characters fit roughly half as many characters in the same space, so a caption plate sized for one language overflows in another. Proper nouns cause the more direct damage: machine translation will happily turn a brand or an ingredient name into an ordinary word, so the safer order is to build a do-not-translate list first and load it as a dictionary.

Ways to produce subtitles

Shoplive's view

Subtitles get filed under accessibility. In commerce they are a selling component. To a viewer with the sound off, a video without subtitles is a silent film, and if that person leaves without understanding the product, that is not an accessibility gap — it is lost revenue. We treat subtitles as something decided at planning, not added in post. Deciding up front which information is spoken and which is written reduces the captioning work itself and makes the video clearer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How accurate is automatic captioning?
Conversational speech comes out quite accurate; brand names, product names and technical terms are where errors cluster. Reviewing those words specifically before publishing is the efficient approach.

Q. Do subtitles help SEO?
When the subtitle text is exposed on the page, search engines and AI can read the video's content as text, which makes it far easier to interpret than video alone.

Q. What should we watch for when producing multiple languages?
Start with a list of words that must not be translated — product names, brands, ingredients. Machine translation will alter these proper nouns, and loading the list as a dictionary stops the same mistake repeating every episode.

Q. Should we use burned-in or soft subtitles?
Where you control the player, such as your own storefront or app, soft subtitles win: corrections and extra languages are a file swap. For video posted straight to social, you cannot guarantee the player will read a subtitle file, so burned-in is the safe choice.

Related terms

• Short-form Commerce

• View Completion Rate

• Highlight Clip