Canonsburg company provides closed captioning for Olympics

February 12, 2018

Stacey Federoff
Pittsburgh Business Times 

Canonsburg-based Vitac Corp. was chosen by NBC Olympics to provide live closed captioning services for its production of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.

The coverage includes captioning for all Olympics programming across NBCUniversal networks, according to a news release.

This is the 12th Olympic Games for which Vitac has provided the service, the release said.

“Vitac is thrilled to continue our decades-long commitment to captioning the Olympic Games,” said Vitac CEO P. Kevin Kilroy. “Captioning the many hours of Olympic coverage across NBCUniversal’s channels is a demanding and very gratifying endeavor, and one that we take great pride in providing to the millions of people around the world who rely on our industry-leading captioning service.”

Vitac provides closed captioning in real-time by trained stenographers, transcribing audio at up to 240 words per minute, according to the release. For many months in advance, they work to create custom dictionaries to guide in the correct spelling of the names of over 2,000 athletes and 147 countries.

The company is the largest provider of realtime and offline captioning products and services in the U.S., captioning more than 500,000 live-program hours annually and 57,000 pre-recorded programs per year.