This paper takes a close look at the recent growth in the DVD market and the rise of subtitling as a rapidly expanding international industry. The author discusses some of the constraints (and possibilities) inherent in subtitling in general, then proceeds to examine how these are dealt with in the DVD subtitling industry. The focus is on subtitling from English into other languages, and all examples used come from the database of the European Captioning Institute (ECI), a subtitling company based in the UK and working in multilingual DVD subtitling. Georgakopoulou’s contribution concludes by analysing the impact that centralisation is having on the profession and discussing the potential offered by the ‘template’, a file containing the master (sub)titles in English and used as the basis for translation into all languages required in a given project.