Made In: Home-grown VITAC leader in closed captioning market
Courtesy of VITAC
Doug Karlovits, general manager of VITAC, has built upon his father’s mission to make television accessible by expanding the one-time four-employee company to the largest closed captioning company in North America. Along with a myriad of accessibility services for the Deaf community, VITAC now offers audio description services for the low vision community.
Katherine Mansfield
“It takes a certain kind of person to be a captioner. You love words and you want to have it as accurate as possible. You’re just passionate about it,” says Mike Cavagnano, a manager of stenography for VITAC. “I always say it is an art, not a science.”
Katherine Mansfield
Mike Cavagnano demonstrates how closed captioners write live television using a steno pad at VITAC, a Verbit company, in Southpointe. VITAC employees write closed captioning for network television, streaming services, Fortune 1000 companies, educational institutes and government agencies, YouTube platforms, and do transcriptions and Spanish dubbing.
Katherine Mansfield
Television towers showcase VITAC employees’ work in action at the Southpointe location. VITAC has offices in Colorado, Quebec and the U.K. and is the largest closed captioning company in North America.
When you turn on the subtitles of the nightly news or your favorite Netflix show, chances are the words dancing across the screen are the work of a VITAC employee.
“We do work for national networks, local stations, producers, various platforms,” said Doug Karlovits, general manger of VITAC, a Verbit company, located in Southpointe. “The landscape of television’s changed greatly over the 37 years we’ve been doing this. It’s a robust audience that now uses captions.”
When VITAC was established in Pittsburgh in 1986, two nonprofits captioned a few hours of network television daily, said Karlovits, and the Deaf community could only access closed captioning through big set-top boxes. VITAC, with its four employees, was the first for-profit business to enter the closed captioning market.
“People weren’t quite sure what to make of us,” said Karlovits. “We were … the first for-profit company, which actually made it hard for people to give us work because we were a disruptor. We were less expensive than what was traditionally out there. Over the years we quickly landed various networks and continued to expand.”
Joe Karlovits, a former court stenographer with a vision (and Doug Karlovits’ father), landed KDKA, the first local news station to close caption its broadcasts. Within two years, VITAC was writing closed captioning for NBC.
“The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” was the first accessible tonight show, thanks to VITAC, which provided real time services. Since then, VITAC has provided closed captioning for national and international networks, streaming services like Hulu and major live events including the Olympics, Oscars and, yes, even the coronation.
“I’ve done some pretty high-profile things. I did write the Oscars, I’ve done the Pro Bowl, and even though there might be hundreds of thousands of people watching it, you don’t really think about it. Well, you try not to,” laughed Mike Cavagnano, a manager of stenography at VITAC who served as a closed captioner for 10 years and has worked at the company for 20.
“I remember when I finished the Oscars, I was like, I did something that I’ve never done before today. It was a pretty cool experience. But we really, basically, every show we try to do our absolute best, whether it’s just your random morning hour of CNN or the Oscars.”
Closed captioning takes passion, Cavagnano said, and requires the ability to learn quickly – loads of prep work is involved for big events, like the Super Bowl. Closed captioning takes discipline and focus, but the job is fun, too, because even if you transcribe the same show daily, content is forever changing.
“It’s fun. It’s challenging. It’s always fast-paced,” he said. “When you’re on the air, it’s you and that (screen), and you’re doing the best you can. There’s so much to it. There’s always something you can improve next time.”
VITAC trains its closed caption employees in three techniques: stenography, audio to text and speech to text. Some captioners type about 300 words per minute on their steno pads, Cavagnano said.
Though AI has made headlines recently – and speculation is it will take over everything from art and writing to humankind – Karlovits doesn’t foresee AI replacing VITAC’s very human employees.
“It’s something that we’ve always worked with,” he said, noting VITAC worked with Carnegie Mellon University’s AI program. “Speech to text was going to replace us, it was always seven years away,” he laughed, “and today it’s gotten a lot better. Our belief is that to make it human understandable, you’re going to need a human involved. And maybe over time that changes what the human involvement is, but to get the best possible quality, you’re going to want people to be engaged. When Verbit bought us, it was a great merger – they shared the same philosophy.”
VITAC moved from Pittsburgh to Southpointe, one of the first companies to call the business park home, in 1998. In 2000, VITAC was sold to private market shareholders, switched hands several times and was purchased by Verbit in 2021. VITAC now has offices in Canonsburg, Greenwood Village, Colo., Montreal, Quebec and the U.K.
The company’s more than 500 employees closed caption about 625,000 hours of programming annually, including writing for educational institutions, Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies. The pandemic actually increased demand for VITAC’s services in those three sectors.
“Our education side of the business, we saw a large growth there because now more students were engaging remotely. Because the schools were shut down, a lot of universities increased their demands on us. We saw an uptick in our corporate business. All of a sudden, everybody’s working remotely, doing Zoom captioning, doing Teams captioning. We were doing the big live events, (Vegan corporate meetings over Zoom). The government side was sort of the same as the corporate,” Karlovits said.
Advances in technology, particularly smartphone tech, and government mandates have made closed captioning more relevant than ever.
“Through various government acts, government helped start funding, making more television accessible. We started to grow,” Karlovits said, noting studies show social media videos garner more engagement when they have captions. “Trying to consume the content where you’re not able to hear it has really broadened our audience.”
“There’s a whole generation of caption viewers now who are just used to seeing captions, whether it be through social media or on the television,” added Dave Titmus, public relations and communications manager for VITAC. “It’s this expected service. I think Netflix did a survey that showed like 78% of viewers preferred watching with captions.”
VITAC started as a solution, as a way to make TV accessible to the hard of hearing community, and while the shifting landscape has made closed captioning popular among general audiences, VITAC continues to be an advocate for accessibility. VITAC has worked with the Federal Communications Commission and, together with other captioning businesses, helped develop the industry’s best practices.
Karlovits said when discussing North America’s largest closed captioning company with his father, Joe Karlovits often shakes his head in awe.
“He was one of the first people to work with computer-aided transcription. His vision was what else could he do? The thought was, we’re going to provide accessibility,” Karlovits said. “This company that had three folks, and then they brought two more people in, kind of came together and just built this behemoth of a company.”