The National Captioning Institute (NCI) was established in 1979 as a nonprofit corporation with the mission of ensuring that deaf and hard of hearing people, as well as others who can benefit from the service, have access to television's entertainment and news through the technology of closed captioning. NCI's closed captioning services for prerecorded national television programs were launched in 1980 in cooperation with ABC, NBC, PBS and the federal government. Real-time captioning of live programming was introduced by NCI in 1982. Then in 1989, NCI partnered with ITT Corporation to develop the first caption-decoding microchip that could be built directly into new television sets.

Over the past two decades, NCI has grown into the largest captioning company in the world with almost 200 employees. With a highly skilled captioning staff and state-of-the-art facilities, NCI provides the highest quality captioning services for broadcast and cable television, home video and DVD, and government and corporate video programming. NCI also provides subtitling and language translation services in over 40 languages and dialects. As part of NCI's commitment to television access, NCI now offers described video service for people who are blind or have low vision. The company is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia near Washington, D.C. and has offices in Burbank, California and Dallas, Texas.

The NCI Foundation oversees the operations of NCI and its subsidiary, the European Captioning Institute (ECI), located in London, England, as well as ULTECH LLC, a Middlebury, Connecticut company that develops and manufactures broadcast and post-production equipment for closed captioning, subtitling and data encoding.

A career at NCI today means working with the world's most advanced captioning systems and highly trained captioning professionals in the prerecorded and live television and home video industries.