Caption Colorado was founded in 1991. It began with one local Denver station
(KCNC-TV) for which it provided free real-time captioning service for one year
for the benefit of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in Colorado. Caption
Colorado secured its first paying customer (WRC-TV in Washington, DC) one year
later. It was at that time that Caption Colorado led the real-time captioning
industry to a radically new low rate of $120 per hour. In the early 90's the
closed captioning industry was a substantially subsidized industry with rates
ranging from $400 to $1,000 per hour for real-time captioning. As a result of
its competitive rate, Caption Colorado was able to secure a large portion of
the growth in the industry over the next nine years and is now America's
largest provider of real-time closed captioning services by a wide margin.
"Real-time" vs. Newsroom Captioning
Caption Colorado offers "real-time" closed captioning that utilizes unique
technologies coupled with the talents of highly skilled captioners who use
stenographic court reporting machines to transcribe the audio on-the-fly, as
the words are spoken by the broadcasters. real-time captioning is not limited
to pre-scripted materials and, therefore, covers 100% of the news, weather and
sports segments of a typical local news broadcast. It will cover such things as
the weather and sports segments which are typically not pre-scripted, last
second breaking news or changes to the scripts, ad lib conversations of the
broadcasters, emergency or other live remote broadcasts by reporters
in-the-field. By failing to cover items such as these, newsroom style
captioning (or use of the TelePrompTer for captioning) typically results in
coverage of less than 30% of a local news broadcast.
