National Captioning Institute

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.