NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

March 16, 2005

NCI Celebrates 25 Successful Years
Of Closed-Captioned Television

Washington, DC – On March 16, 1980, the National Captioning Institute (NCI) presented the first closed-captioned television programs: The ABC Sunday Night Movie (ABC), The Wonderful World of Disney (NBC) and Masterpiece Theatre (PBS). A silence had been broken. For the first time ever, deaf people across America could turn on their television sets—with a caption decoder—and finally understand what they had been missing on television. It was the first of many groundbreaking steps for NCI.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of this momentous occasion is here and there is a truly phenomenal story to tell. It is a story of dedication and service, of research and exploration, and most importantly, it is a story of explosive growth and success for NCI.

From that Sunday evening in 1980 to today, the amount of captioned programming has grown from 16 hours per week to hundreds of hours per day. The first two movies captioned for ABC were Force 10 from Navarone and Dr. Zhivago. Other programs captioned as part of the rollout of the new service were Eight is Enough, Three’s Company, Diff’rent Strokes, and Nova. The list of captioned programs grew rapidly. Today, all programming from the major broadcast networks and most programs from cable networks are captioned.

Although originally developed to provide access to television for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, research has found that captioning provides significant educational benefits for this original target audience as well as for many other people. Studies showed that a significant number of people watching captioned television were recent immigrants using captions to help learn English as a second language. Other research showed how captions improved reading, language and vocabulary skills for children and adults.

“From a little known service that provided access to television for a small but very appreciative audience in 1980, closed captioning has expanded into a major accessibility service that touches the lives of millions of people every day,” commented Jack Gates, President and CEO of NCI Operations. “As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first broadcast, NCI is extremely proud of providing a service that has such a positive impact on so many individuals, as well as the phenomenal growth of this essential service, and the people who made it all possible.”

NCI was established in 1979 in cooperation with ABC, NBC, PBS and the federal government as a nonprofit corporation with the mission of promoting and providing access to television programs for the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities through the technology of closed captioning. Following the successful introduction of closed captioning for prerecorded programs in 1980, NCI began experimenting with techniques to make closed captioning available on live programming. Then in March of 1982, NCI introduced real-time captioning on ABC’s live coverage of the 54th Annual Academy Awards Presentation. Subsequently, the real-time service enabled closed captions to be provided for live news coverage and sporting events as they happened.

In the 1990’s, came more accomplishments. One of the first, and most significant, came early in 1990. Along with its partner ITT Corporation, NCI developed the first caption-decoding microchip that could be built directly into new television sets. The development of the chip led to the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, which mandated that effective July 1, 1993, all television sets with a screen 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the U.S. must incorporate caption-decoding circuitry. As a result, the 20 million people buying new televisions each year since 1993 have gained access to captions with a push of a few buttons on the remote control.

In 1991, NCI broke new ground once again as it presented deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers with their first access to “gavel-to-gavel” proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives on C-SPAN. In 2001, NCI introduced real-time Spanish captioning with mixed-case text and accents. Now, NCI is expanding its capabilities to make captioning available on digital media such as videos viewed using media players on personal computers and live Webcasts.

Overall, captioning has grown tremendously in the past 25 years. With the support of a never-ending list of corporate partners, producers, cable networks, syndicators, home video companies and the major broadcast networks, captioning is now a household word. Children’s programming, sports, news, weather, talk shows, game shows, comedies, dramas, commercials, special events—you name it, now you can get it captioned. And, through an unparalleled show of support from the federal government, the future looks brighter than ever.

As part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued rules requiring the captioning of 100% of new television programming by 2006. The FCC also ruled that 75% of programming first aired prior to 1998 must be captioned by 2008. Access to captioning will no longer be an issue.

“That’s quite an evolution in twenty-five short years,” noted Karen O’Connor, NCI’s National Director of Sales and Marketing. “As a tool for learning, a vehicle for commerce, a fountain of entertainment, and an unparalleled lifeline to news and information, closed captioning is a unique instrument whose music has no melody, but whose words change lives.”

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National Captioning Institute
With offices in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (Vienna, VA); Burbank, CA; Dallas, TX; and London, England, the nonprofit National Captioning Institute is the global captioning leader, supplying the highest quality closed captioning and related services for broadcast and cable television, home video and DVD, and government and corporate video programming.

For More Information:

Contact: Jay Feinberg

703-917-7600 (V/TTY)

703-917-9853 (FAX)

jfeinberg@ncicap.org

 

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