Streaming Settings

Streaming apps ship with defaults nobody asked for, and the switches that turn them off are buried, renamed between platforms, and frequently attached to a profile rather than to the account. That last detail is why people switch something off and find it apparently back the next day, on a service that never touched their setting.

The guides collected here give the exact menu path for each service and each device, written out as steps rather than described in prose, with the phone app, the browser and the television listed separately because they are genuinely different screens. Following an instruction written for one of the three while sitting in front of another accounts for a large share of the frustration around these controls.

A second recurring surprise is that some of these settings are not in the app at all. Subtitle size, colour and background are an operating system setting on nearly every platform, which is why adjusting them once adjusts them across every service on that device, and why hunting for the control inside Netflix leads nowhere.

Where a service has removed a control, we say so plainly instead of sending you to a setting that no longer exists. Prime Video, for instance, exposes no switch for browse-screen previews on its television apps. That is an unsatisfying answer and it is the correct one.