VITAC

VITAC is one of the United States' largest closed captioning and media access companies. The company is headquartered in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, with additional facilities in Arlington, Virginia and North Hollywood, California. VITAC is a division of Merrill Corporation and employs 250 people. The company captions over 170,000 hours of programming each year for over 400 customers, including CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and Discovery Communications. The company has captioned the Olympics. VITAC is a division of Merrill Corporation and employs 250 people.

History

VITAC was founded in 1986 as CaptionAmerica, a small company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with one captioning contract for KDKA local news and a huge commitment to develop closed captioning services and solutions.

By 1993, CaptionAmerica had become the country's largest, for-profit captioning company and had broadened its focus. To reflect the change, a new corporate identity was selected. The new name, VITAC (for VITal ACcess), reflected the company's recent growth into new markets, including video description and subtitling.

Events and milestones

• 1986 – VITAC gets its first contract captioning Pittsburgh's KDKA nightly news broadcast.
• 1988 – VITAC becomes first to caption both Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
• 1990 – VITAC captions its first national news program The Today Show.
• 1992 – VITAC begins captioning The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
• 1993 – CNN becomes yet another well known client of VITAC.
• 1994 – VITAC begins to provide round the clock captioning for NBC during the O.J. Simpson investigation and trial throughout 1994 and 1995.
• 1995 – ABC becomes a client of VITAC.
• 1997 – VITAC adds all Fox Sports Networks to list of customers.
• 2000 – VITAC helps customers prepare for new U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandates related to captioning.
• 2003 – VITAC introduced multilanguage subtitling department, providing translation and subtitling in over 50 languages.
• 2004 – Discovery Communications chooses VITAC to caption its 14 television networks.
• 2005 – VITAC becomes the exclusive captioning provider for The Weather Channel.
• 2006 – VITAC begins offering real-time, simultaneous captioning for sporting events, in English and Spanish.
• 2007 – VITAC offers real-time captioning, special report coverage and customer support to NBC news programs, 10 NBC O&Os and Telemundo.
• 2008 – VITAC provides Spanish captioning for TuTV.
• 2009 – VITAC beings captioning for NHK, the Japanese broadcast network, as well as HRTV and Zuffa

Community

Viewers who benefit from captioning and other accessibility solutions do not often pay for the service. Captioning is a valuable service for the one in ten Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing and viewers watching television in noisy environments. The service helps young children develop reading skills, and is a valuable learning tool for those learning English as a second language.

In 2008, VITAC launched CaptionsON, a public information campaign detailing the benefits of closed captioning. The website associated with the campaign provides advice to viewers with caption problems and contact information for many networks.

VITAC is a member of the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, COAT, and a coalition of over 240 national, regional, state, and community-based disability organizations. COAT advocates for legislative and regulatory safeguards that will ensure full access by people with disabilities to evolving high speed broadband, wireless and other Internet Protocol (IP) technologies. Part of this initiative is the introduction of new legislation, HR3101.

Competitors

VITAC is the nation’s largest provider of real-time captioning for nationally broadcast programs. Competitors include Caption Colorado, CaptionMax, National Captioning Institute, Video Caption Corporation, WGBH, and Soundwriters, among others.

See also

• Closed captioning

External links

• Official website