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 two decades, NCI has grown into the largest
captioning company in the world with almost 200 employees. With a highly
skilled captioning staff and state-of-the-art facilities, NCI provides
the highest quality captioning services for broadcast and cable television,
home video and DVD, and government and corporate video programming.
NCI also provides subtitling and language translation services in over
40 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 Vienna, 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), located in London, England, as
well as ULTECH
LLC, a Middlebury, Connecticut company that develops and
manufactures broadcast and post-production equipment for closed captioning,
subtitling and data encoding.
