First newscast in your area to be closed-captioned?

[johnnya2k6 171]

30 years ago, the National Captioning Institute was formed, as television programming was about to be closed-captioned for hearing impaired viewers. Back then, external closed-captioning decoders were expensive (dunno how much they were a pop) until internal decoders began to be mandated on newer TVs in the early 1990s.

 

Nowadays on syndicated shows, you would hear the famous "Closed-captioning sponsored by..." plug; imagine Lord Alfred Hayes saying that if he was alive today!

 

NCI, Vitac, and Media Access Group (WGBH) have been the dominant captioners for years, with Captionmax joining the party a few years ago.

 

ABC's "World News (Tonight)" and probably CBC's "The National" were the first network newscasts in North America to be closed-captioned in around 1982...but what about the local news??? Who were the first in your market with that milestone? Here in Alaska, it was KTUU in about 1992-93, though the larger-market stations began captioning their news earlier than that.

[james32746 8]

WESH was the first in Orlando with closed captioned newscasts in 1988.

[bostonmediaguy 123]

WCVB Boston began captioning in March 1986. Along with WGBH, the two stations were the first in the country to closed caption its newscasts.

[detroiter313 178]

WDIV in Detroit was the first station to offer closed-captioning in 1989, in the following years they added "real-time" live captioning for its 5:00pm, 6:00pm, and 11:00pm newscasts.

[WXmanTim 88]

I recall dxing and watching an open-captioned repeat of WCPO's 11pm newscast circa 1990, perhaps as early as 89, after our local PBS station (WNIN-Evansville) signed-off for the night. The conditions had to be just right to overcome the interference, but most of the time it was pretty clear.

 

I couldn't even hazard a guess as to when the Evansville station started full-time captioning as my family almost always had used televisions that did not have built-in decoders. I would hazard a guess and say most smaller market stations didn't get captioned until newsroom computer systems became standard in the mid-to-late 90s.

 

BTW i found an article that states that ABC began working with the National Bureau of Standards in the early 1970s on captioning and that WGBH/PBS began offering captioned ABC News broadcasts as early as 1973.

[Jess 1110]

I remember the first Philly station to do it was KYW, during the "News Tonight" period in the early 90s. (Probably around 1992.) At that time it was sponsored by US Healthcare, and I remember it because the plug always used a clip from Singin' In The Rain for some reason.