For this one show (John Oliver) I download, I always get ALL CAPS and poorly synced subtitles. The text seems OK, but it's barely usable because very off-sync. I'm curious: where do these subs come from?
Oh that "teletext" thing I guess, I get it. I remember using subtitles from this source in France in the 90s, and it was never that off sync. I guess the way they're ripped may make the offsyncedness worse.
I only saw American closed captions on live TV almost two decades ago but the quality was much worse than the European teletext. In my country the teletext subtitles had small caps, italics and colors to identify who's talking instead the American ones, I'm guessing because they were introduced a few years earlier with a more primitive tech, were always behind and not exactly accurate to what was spoken, like if someone was typing them on the fly
Teletext is a british invention, and the basis for european television caption.
the US system is based on the european one, and it's likely that the reason for the difference on the captioning is something other than the tech.
f.ex that in US it's less common to use cc or smth, or that the cc was made live, i.e. during the broadcast, like a fotball match or smth.