The
National Captioning Institute (NCI) was
established in 1979 as a nonprofit corporation with the mission of ensuring
that deaf and hard of hearing people, as well as others who can benefit
from the service, have access to television's entertainment and news
through the technology of closed captioning. NCI's closed captioning
services for prerecorded national television programs were launched
in 1980 in cooperation with ABC, NBC, PBS and the federal government.
Real-time captioning of live programming was introduced by NCI in 1982.
Then in 1989, NCI partnered with ITT Corporation to develop the first
caption-decoding microchip that could be built directly into new television
sets.
Over the past three decades, NCI has remained a leading
provider of closed captioning and other media access services. With
a highly skilled captioning staff and state-of-the-art facilities, NCI
provides the highest quality captioning services for broadcast and cable
television, Webcasting, home video and DVD, and government and corporate
video programming. NCI also provides subtitling and language translation
services in over 50 languages and dialects. As part of NCI's commitment
to television access, NCI now offers described video service for people
who are blind or have low vision. The company is headquartered in Chantilly,
Virginia near Washington, D.C. and has offices in Burbank, California
and Dallas, Texas.
The NCI Foundation oversees the operations of NCI and
its subsidiary, the
European Captioning Institute (ECI), headquartered in London,
England with offices in Los Angeles and Athens.
