The end of August means many things — students returning to classes, the last weeks of summer, and the busiest days of the year for VITAC captioners.
As a 24/7, 365-day-a-year operation, busy days are nothing new to VITAC captioners, production coordinators, schedulers, and supervisors. This time of year, however, brings a perfect storm of programming and sports scheduling.
VITAC is serving up aces this week in our captioning of DIRECTV’s live coverage of the US Open tennis championship, the final major tennis event of the season. VITAC realtime captioners are scheduled to caption 350 hours of grand slam coverage on DIRECTV through September 2. DIRECTV is broadcasting multiple court feeds and coverage of the tournament from the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, NY.
The NCAA college football season also kicks into high gear this week with a full slate of games, including high-profile first-week matchups between No. 6 Washington and No. 9 Auburn and No. 12 Notre Dame taking on No. 14 Michigan.
VITAC will be there for all the action, as we’ll be captioning nearly three dozen college football games this week.
Our realtime teams have been wearing their games faces for a little while now, pulling together team rosters, stats, and information for thousands of players and teams taking the field in the weeks and months ahead.
Our schedulers and sports supervisors are working to ensure captioners are available for each game, and making sure we have the lists of proper network connections.
Coordinators are working to establish and test multiple IP and encoder connections, and monitoring start and finish times for all the games to make sure we don’t miss a single snap or minute of pre-game coverage or post-game wrap-up.
And the action isn’t going to slow down anytime soon as the National Football League kicks off its 2018 season next week, with VITAC captioning the Thursday night (Sept. 6) season opener between the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles and the Atlanta Falcons on NBC.
VITAC will bring captions to more than 110 NFL games this regular season, including those on FOX, NBC, and the NFL Network.
So whether college football is your thing or the pro game is your passion, we’ve got you covered, and will be here every Saturday and Sunday (and Thursdays and Mondays) to caption all the high-flying offenses, hard-hitting defenses, furious comebacks, and unbelievable upsets.
Click here to learn more about VITAC’s accessible solutions offerings.