[peterclary]

To announce a big new release and announce vaguely that subtitle support for iOS and Android downloads is still "coming soon" is a massive kick in the teeth. At this point they should at least be able to give us an ETA.

What is it that makes it harder to support subtitles in downloads rather than streaming? I suppose I can see that with streaming you can serve up subtitled or non-subtitled streams according to user preference, but iOS has native support for subtitles in video.

Is this some kind of crappy contractual/rights-holder thing, where "mobile devices" have to be negotiated separately?

[superbignerd]

I am not an iOS developer, so pardon my ignorance - but does iOS have support of http://www.w3.org/TR/ttaf1-dfxp/ ? That's how iPlayer currently supports subtitles for streaming.

[hellweaver666]

Do iOS/Android natively support subtitles on video streams? If so, there's really no excuse for it.

[jasomill]

I believe the answer for iOS is both yes and no: it natively supports text subtitles, but not DVD/Blu-ray-style bitmap subtitles.