You’re sitting there, trying to enjoy the latest episode of The Bear or maybe a chaotic Sunday Night Football game, and suddenly, giant white blocks of text start swallowing half the screen. It’s distracting. It’s annoying. Worst of all, sometimes those captions lag three seconds behind the actual dialogue, so you read the punchline before the actor even opens their mouth. If you’re wondering how to turn off captioning on YouTube TV, you aren't alone. Thousands of people fumble with their remotes every single night trying to find that one specific toggle.
It should be easy. It isn't always.
The thing about YouTube TV is that it lives on basically every device known to man. It’s on your smart TV, your iPhone, your dusty old Xbox, and that Chromecast dangling off the back of your monitor. Because the interface shifts slightly depending on what hardware you’re using, the "off" switch isn't always in the same spot.
Why your captions keep coming back like a ghost
Sometimes you turn them off, and then—boom—the next time you change the channel, they’re back. This usually happens because of a conflict between the YouTube TV app settings and the "System Wide" accessibility settings on your device. If your Roku or Apple TV has "Captions Always On" enabled in the main gear icon menu, the YouTube TV app might try to respect those wishes, even if you manually clicked "CC" on the video player.
Honestly, it’s a mess of competing software permissions.
Most people think they’ve broken something. You haven't. You’ve just run into a classic case of "Smart" technology being a little too persistent for its own good. To fix this, we have to look at the specific way the app interacts with your remote.
The quick fix for most Smart TVs and streaming sticks
If you are using a Roku, Fire Stick, or a built-in Samsung/LG app, the process is mostly universal. You don’t need to go deep into the settings menu for a quick change.
While the video is playing, press the Down button on your remote. This usually brings up the progress bar (the "scrubber"). Press Down one more time. You should see a row of icons. One of them looks like a little speech bubble or a box with "CC" inside it. Highlight that. Click it. Select "Off."
It sounds simple, but here is where people get tripped up: the "secondary" menu. On some versions of the app, clicking that CC icon opens a sub-menu for language and styling. You have to make sure you actually hit the "Disable" or "Off" button and then—this is the part everyone forgets—press the Back or Exit button to save the state. If you just let the menu time out and disappear on its own, the app occasionally "forgets" the change you just made.
Dealing with the Apple TV remote trackpad
Apple TV users have it the hardest because that Siri Remote is... sensitive. If you swipe the wrong way, you’re suddenly ten minutes back in the show. To handle captioning here, you swipe Down while the video is active to bring up the info panel. From there, you use the trackpad to swipe over to the "Subtitles" tab.
Click it. Select "Off."
If you find that captions are still appearing even after you did this, the culprit is almost certainly the tvOS system settings. You’ll need to leave the YouTube TV app, go to the Settings app on the Apple TV home screen, hit Accessibility, and check Subtitles and Captioning. If "Closed Captions and SDH" is toggled on there, it will override almost everything you do inside individual apps.
How to turn off captioning on YouTube TV via mobile or desktop
Maybe you’re watching on your laptop during a "lunch break" or on your phone while commuting. The process is a bit more tactile here.
On a web browser (Chrome, Safari, etc.), just hover your mouse over the video player. You’ll see the CC icon in the bottom right corner, right next to the gear icon for quality settings. If there’s a red line under the "CC," they are on. Click it. The red line disappears. Captions gone.
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On a smartphone, it’s a bit more hidden. You have to tap the screen once to see the overlay. Look for the three dots (the "More" menu) in the top right corner. Tap that. A menu slides up from the bottom of your screen. One of those options is "Captions." Tap it and select "Turn off captions."
The "Sticky Setting" problem and how to kill it
Let’s talk about why your settings might not be sticking. This is a huge complaint on Reddit threads and Google support forums.
- Multiple Accounts: If you share a YouTube TV Family Plan, settings can sometimes get weirdly synced if you’re using a "Guest" profile or if someone else is logged into your "Brand Account."
- The Browser Cache: On desktops, if your browser is set to clear cookies every time you close it, YouTube TV will treat you like a brand-new user every morning. That means it might revert to "Default" settings, which often include captions if you previously had them on.
- VOD vs. Live TV: This is a big one. When you watch "Video on Demand" (the stuff with the yellow ad markers), the captioning data is baked into the file differently than a live broadcast. Sometimes, turning off captions for a live NFL game won't carry over to a VOD episode of Grey’s Anatomy. You might have to toggle it off once for each "type" of content before the app learns your preference.
Customizing instead of killing
Sometimes you don't actually want them off; you just want them to stop being so ugly.
YouTube TV actually has some of the best caption customization in the streaming world, but nobody uses it. If you go into the CC menu, you can usually find "Options" or "Captions Settings." You can change the background opacity to 0%, making the text float over the video without that jarring black box. You can change the font to something less "government document" and more "modern cinema." You can even change the text color to a soft yellow, which is way easier on the eyes during nighttime viewing.
What to do when the CC button is grayed out
It happens. You go to turn off the captions and the button just... isn't clickable.
This usually means one of two things. First, the channel might be broadcasting "open captions." This is rare in 2026, but some local access channels or emergency broadcasts have the text literally burned into the video feed. If it's burned in, no software toggle in the world can remove it. You're stuck with it.
Second, the app might be frozen. It’s a classic "turn it off and back on again" situation. Force-close the YouTube TV app, or better yet, unplug your TV for 30 seconds. This clears the temporary RAM (the cache) and often fixes the glitch where the UI elements become unresponsive.
Actionable steps for a caption-free experience
To ensure you never have to deal with rogue text again, follow this specific order of operations. First, check your physical hardware settings—whether it's a Sony TV, a Roku, or an Apple box—and ensure "Accessibility Captions" are toggled to "Off" at the system level.
Next, open YouTube TV and pick a high-profile live channel like CNN or ESPN. Toggle the captions on and then immediately back off using the Down-Down-Select method on your remote. This "shrubbing" of the setting often forces a sync with your Google account's cloud settings.
Finally, if you’re on a computer, make sure you aren't using an "Ad Blocker" or "Script Blocker" that might be interfering with the way the player saves your preferences. Some privacy extensions see the "save setting" command as a tracking cookie and block it, which is why your captions keep resetting every time you refresh the page.
If you’ve done all that, you should finally have a clear, text-free view of your screen.