Captionmax
# Captionmax

Captionmax is one of North America's largest closed captioning and media accessibility companies. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with additional locations in New York City, New York and Burbank, California. The company provides captions, subtitles, translation, video description, and as-broadcast scripts for over 450 customers including all major broadcast and cable TV networks, production companies, studios, distributors, educational institutions, government agencies, large corporations and Internet portals. Some clients include Warner Bros. Television (CW network productions), NBCUniversal (network productions), McGraw-Hill, Viacom Media Networks and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

On September 21, 2022, Captionmax was officially rebranded as 3Play Media.

## History

Captionmax is a privately owned business. The company was founded in 1992 by Max Duckler. In the last 25 years, Captionmax has expanded from a small, one person shop to a company of over 100 employees and independent contractors working on a variety of accessible media services. Today, Captionmax owns buildings in both Minneapolis, MN and Glendale, CA.

* 1993 - Captionmax gets its first captioning contract from Hazelden.
* 1995 - Captionmax partners with DCMP.
* 1996 - Captionmax wins its first cooperative agreement award to caption syndicated programming such as Hometime and Dukes of Hazzard.
* 1997 - Captionmax hosts its first Consumer Advisory Board Meeting.
* 2003 - Captionmax Video Description Department is added in-house.
* 2004 - Captionmax builds a new 13,500 square feet (1,250 $m^2)$ facility in Burbank. The facility houses satellites, real time operations, and the largest offline captioning staff in California.
* 2006 - Captionmax is awarded two 5-year Access to Emerging Technologies grants from the U.S. Department of Education.
* 2007 - Captionmax builds a new 25,000 square feet (2,300 $m^2)$ LEED certified headquarters in Minneapolis, MN.
* 2007 - Captionmax partners with the National Association of the Deaf to increase accessible media in the classroom.
* 2008 - Captionmax collaborated with NCSeT to research video description.
* 2009 - Captionmax partners with Discovery Education under a U.S. Department of Education grant to increase accessibility to educational media used in K-12 classrooms.
* 2010 - Captionmax awarded $2.5 million grant to provide video description.
* 2017 - Captionmax's leadership team led a management buyout.
* 2018 - Captionmax received the "Eye on Impact" Award from CBS.
* 2021 - Captionmax acquired National Captioning Canada [Wikidata] in March.
* 2022 - Captionmax was acquired by 3Play Media [Wikidata] in February.

## Partnerships

In 2006 Captionmax entered the educational multimedia market.

In 2008, Captionmax collaborated with the National Center for Supported eText (NCSeT) in an initiative called The Supportive Video Project. The goal of this collaboration was to research enhanced video description options for educational learning.

Captionmax also partners with the Described and Captioned Media Program to provide closed captions, subtitles, and video description to their library.

Captionmax authors hundreds of hours of accessible interactive educational materials used in K-12 classrooms across the country. This media contains enhancements, such as video description and captioned glossary terms, to help children on comprehension tests.

For the past 15 years, Captionmax has hosted a Consumer Advisory Board Meeting attended by Captionmax staff, business professionals in the accessibility world, teachers, and students.

## Research and development

In 2006, Captionmax was awarded two five-year Access to Emerging Technologies grants from the U.S. Department of Education. These grants enabled Captionmax to participate in research and development with other organizations, such as DCMP and Cued Speech Discovery and Information Services.

