Captioning a real-time success

Already No. 1., company has FCC regulations to thank for new, plentiful markets

By Heather Draper, News Staff Writer

Mute the volume on your television set during a local newscast and try to figure out what's going on.

You've just entered the world of the deaf and hard-of-hearing, many of whom rely on the services of a Colorado company to provide the dialogue with their local newscasts through closed captioning.

Greenwood Village-based Caption Colorado recently marked its 10-year anniversary with the news that it had doubled the number of customers it serves and the amount of hours it captions nationwide.

From its modest beginnings in 1991 with three captioners and one customer -- Denver's KCNC-Channel 4 -- Caption Colorado now provides real-time closed captioning to 96 stations in 40 markets in more than 30 states. It is the nation's largest provider of real-time closed captioning to local and national markets.

The company is poised for even bigger growth because of Internet captioning and Federal Communications Commission regulations requiring the top 25 television markets (including Denver) to close caption 100 percent of their broadcast day by 2006.

"One out of every four homes in America has a person living in it who is deaf or hard of hearing," said Tad Polumbus, president of Caption Colorado. "Between the FCC regulations and Internet possibilities, we're looking at huge growth potential."

Closed captions are hidden in the video signal, invisible without a special decoder. Since July 1993, all television sets with screens 13 inches or larger have had built-in decoder circuitry. Open captions -- such as foreign movie subtitles -- differ from closed captions in that they're an intregal part of the television picture and can't be turned off.

As directed by Congress in 1996, the FCC adopted rules requiring closed captioning of most televison programming to make broadcasts more accessible to the deaf community.

The FCC rules, which went into effect in 1998, are being phased in so television stations have time to meet the strict captioning requirements, Polumbus said.

"We're about in the middle of the phase-in right now," he said. "That means we'll continue to see a substantial increase in growth on the real-time captioning side of our business."

Real-time captioning -- done as the event occurs -- was Caption Colorado's first service and continues to be its bread and butter, said Patty White, vice president of operations.

"Other captioning companies do more offline (after the fact) captioning, and we do some, but we're way ahead of everyone else in real-time captioning," White said.

White, a former court reporter, was one of Caption Colorado's three original captioners.

"Most of the national broadcasts at that time were captioned, but as far as local stations, there weren't many doing it," she said. "The price on captioning was so high, most stations couldn't afford to do it."

Caption Colorado made it more affordable for local stations by bringing down the price to about $120 an hour from $400 to $800 an hour, White said.

Denver's Channel 4 was one of the first local stations in the nation to do real-time closed captioning of its newscast, years before the FCC mandated it.

Channel 4 General Manager Marv Rockford said the station had a sense of responsibility to its deaf viewers, but also saw them as an untapped audience.

"Part of it is a sense of responsibility and part of it, frankly, is if we think there is an audience out there interested in the news and no one is reaching out to them, it's an opportunity for us," Rockford said.

He noted Channel 4 takes "great pride in the fact that 100 percent of our news programming is real-time captioned."

White said Channel 4, then an NBC affiliate, helped Caption Colorado grow by its testimonials to other NBC stations.

'We'd been doing work for KCNC for about a year, when KCNC mentioned to other NBC stations that we were doing affordable captioning," she said. "Word of mouth really built our business among local TV stations for the first four or five years."

Caption Colorado also relies on input and support from the deaf community, locally and nationally, to expand its business.

Judy Oliver, a deaf viewer in Cleveland, has nothing but praise for Caption Colorado's work.

"Millions of us rely on their every key stroke," she said.

Englewood resident LaFawn Biddle, an advocate for the deaf community, has been working with Caption Colorado to develop captioning for video streaming.

"It's a service where you can watch TV when you want to -- not necessarily when it's broadcast," she said. "If it becomes a reality, it could benefit this community tremendously."

The company's president said he's excited by the new technology Caption Colorado is exploring.

"We have a lot of customers, including (KUSA) Channel 9, who take their news over to the Internet," Polumbus said. "We're now getting into that business by developing proprietary captioning software to capture video and audio on the Internet."

He mentioned caption news streaming, annual meeting Webcasts, long-distance learning Internet classes, teleconferencing and second-language captioning as some of the areas of potential growth for the company.

One of his favorite new endeavors is bringing live commentary to deaf or hard-of-hearing Broncos fans at Invesco Field at Mile High.

Fans can exchange their driver's license at the game for a hand-held video device that vibrates when something comes over the PA system and shows captioned text of what was said.

"This is one of the neatest things we've done," Polumbus said. "It brings live entertainment to the deaf. They want to get their news, but they want to have fun, too."

November 2, 2001