Nearly half of U.S. viewers now watch video with captions

Captions are no longer an edge-case accessibility setting; they are a mainstream viewing habit across five major markets. For streaming platforms, that makes caption quality, default behavior, and localization a core part of the playback experience rather than an afterthought. The same survey finding across the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, and Germany suggests this is a broad consumer behavior, not a single-market quirk. The key signal to watch next is whether future surveys break out how often captions are enabled in each individual market, since the article only gives the U.S. “nearly half” figure and a cross-market summary.