The National Captioning Institute, Inc. is a 501 nonprofit organization that provides real-time and off-line closed captioning, subtitling and translation, described video, web captioning, and Spanish captioning for television and films. Created in 1979 and headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, the organization was the first to caption live TV and home video, and holds the trademark on the display icon featuring a simple geometric rendering of a television set merged with a speech balloon to indicate that a program is captioned by National Captioning Institute. National Captioning Institute also has an office in Santa Clarita, California.
History
The National Association of Broadcasters formed a task force in 1972 to create the technology to provide captions of television broadcasts without an unreasonably large financial burden on television networks or local television stations. Federal funding paid for the technology. Viewers would buy an adapter for their televisions that would decode and display the text while watching closed-captioned television programs. Up to that point, captioning of television shows was rare, with Boston television station WGBH being one of the few with open captioning of news and public affairs shows since the early 1970s. National Captioning Institute was incorporated on January 30, 1979, with millions of dollars of start-up funding from the federal government. On March 23, 1979, United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare announced plans for closed-captioning of twenty hours per week of television shows. National Captioning Institute established its original headquarters in Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia, and later that year it established a second office in Los Angeles. National Captioning Institute's work first became publicly well known on March 16, 1980, when ABC, NBC, and PBS collectively introduced closed-captioning of their television shows. At the time, CBS decided not the join the group at first because CBS preferred a different captioning system that was being used in Europe. John E.D. Ball was the founding president of the National Captioning Institute. Mark Okrand was National Captioning Institute's first supervisor of captioning, overseeing the transcription of audio. At the time, employees of National Captioning Institute used court-reporter steno machines to caption shows. Rosalynn Carter hosted a reception at the White House honoring the work of National Captioning Institute on March 19, 1980. In 1981, Hollywood Radio and Television Society gave an award to the National Captioning Institute for developing the closed captioning system for television shows. In 1981, RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video became the first video company to release movies on videotape that had closed captions. In 1993, a federal law went into effect that required built-in capacity to display captions on all televisions 13 inches or larger, which would make purchasing separate decoders no longer necessary. Virtually all television shows were being broadcast with closed-captions at that point. In 2006, National Captioning Institute terminated the employment of 14 employees who had joined the National Association of Employees and Transmission Technicians in an effort to have reasonable workloads, receive annual cost-of-living raises, and prevent cuts in employee benefit plans.
Live captioning
Since 1982, NCI has provided real-time captions for live television – including news, sporting events, weather bulletins, government meetings and speeches, and specialized program.
