In 1986, a small firm - CaptionAmerica - opened its doors in Pittsburgh, PA with a single captioning contract for the local news and a huge commitment to develop closed captioning services nationwide. By 1988, firm had a contract to caption the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for NBC and CBS. With a high quality staff, by 1993 CaptionAmerica had become largest, for-profit captioning company in the US and had broadened its focus. Reflecting the change, the firm was renamed VITAC and was soon poised for international growth and leadership. In 2000, VITAC became a part of WordWave, Inc. making that international growth and leadership a reality. The firm became a WordWave company and became known internationally with the VITACâs signature seen on widely-viewed programming such as the Super Bowl, Academy Awards, Olympic Games, World Series - also serving a range producers, broadcasters, webcasters and syndicators in the entertainment, government, corporate and education fields. Offering live and prerecorded captioning in both English and Spanish, multi-language subtitling in over 45 languages, Internet captioning and video description, the firm has won numerous awards and in 2001 began to offer video description services. Also involved in ollout of new datacast services such as V-chip ratings encoding and participate in standards-setting activities for TV data systems with the Consumer Electronics Association (formerly EIA) and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). Having long since outgrown SBIR eligibility, in 2021 VITAC was acquired by New York City based Verbit - a leading player inthe spacenow using smart AI technology to disrupt captioning and transcription with speed and automation
