We’ve recently heard other captioning companies tout the fact that they do more than 1,000 hours of captioning each week. And while that certainly sounds impressive, it’s all in a day’s work for VITAC.
Actually, less than a day’s work.
VITAC creates more than 1,500 hours of captions each day.
We captioned more than 575,000 hours of programming last year – that’s a little more than 11,000 hours of captioning per week. We supply captions for almost all network, broadcast, and cable companies as well as Fortune 100 companies, federal, state, and local governments, event centers and sports teams, and educational institutions.
The graphic below shows some of VITAC’s impressive numbers.
We’ve also heard other companies boast that they import dozens of broadcast feeds to monitor their captions and caption quality.
Well, monitoring captions and caption quality is a staple of what we do, and have been doing for the past 33 years.
VITAC is a full-service company, offering realtime, offline, multi-language, subtitling, and encoding services. Doing business with us means you get trained, certified, and qualified captioners, professional scheduling, production, technical, and client service departments, and 24/7/365 client-support services. Our client services team is a one-stop point of contact for all scheduling, coordination, and production-related needs, including last-minute schedule changes or program edits.
Our offline (pre-recorded) captioners receive in-depth, one-on-one instruction in offline techniques, and all are trained to caption from VITAC’s “Offline Captioning Style Guide” to ensure that no matter who is captioning a given program, the appearance of the captions is consistent to make it easier for viewers to enjoy. All of our prerecorded captioning is verbatim with the program audio and complies with all FCC Caption Quality Best Practices.
For realtime (live captioning), VITAC screens all new realtime captioners, reviews each candidate’s written, unedited files, and evaluates for speed, accuracy, theory, and writing style. After hire, all of our realtime captioners are trained by veteran captioners. During the training program, all trainees must achieve designated benchmarks related to captioning quality and accuracy.
Proven Technology
As a captioning industry pioneer and leading US provider, we also have the best available and proven technology to solve a wide variety of captioning and accessibility challenges. It’s the reason we handle some of the most significant events in the corporate and media and entertainment worlds, like the Olympics and large-scale conference and business gatherings.
And we’re continually taking steps to improve our already top-notch captioning and accessibility services, providing greater reliability for caption clients and viewers.
For instance, earlier this year, we introduced the newest addition to the VITAC Power Connect™ (VPC) family of products. VPC Control Tower™, a first-of-its-kind cloud-based application, allowing easy, always-on connections between captioners, events, and clients and serving as a central hub that establishes multi-level monitoring and management of client programming.
VPC Control Tower serves as a traffic director for captions, ensuring that captioners working with new, specially developed VITAC software – VPC Client™ – are routed to the proper audio and video sources as well as the correct endpoints. It enables 24/7 monitoring not only of captions and caption paths, but also of the entire captioning workflow process, including captioner readiness, caption transmission, and transcript delivery.
We take great pride in the work we do, the captions we provide, and the essential services that we provide to the nearly 50 million Americans in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. There is a reason we’ve been doing this for more than three decades – we’re good at it!