Case Study: VITAC achieves reliable, low-latency live captioning at scale with Ably

VITAC lowered the cost of growth by offloading responsibility for business-critical realtime infrastructure

VITAC, the world’s largest full-service caption and transcription company, needed 100% reliable, ultra-low-latency transport to deliver live captions for high-stakes broadcasts and events (Olympic Games, World Cup, major news and government channels). To meet strict regulatory and quality requirements across a four-stage real‑time pipeline (ingest, translate, caption, transmit) VITAC partnered with Ably to provide a realtime message bus and transport layer for its teleconferencing captioning service.

Ably implemented its realtime infrastructure — including Pub/Sub, Guaranteed Delivery & Ordering, Connection State Recovery, encryption, limit boosters, active traffic management and 24x7 support — to absorb traffic spikes and ensure ordered, low-latency message delivery. With Ably handling scale and reliability, VITAC can deliver live captions to millions of viewers, support thousands of unexpected concurrent users, meet sub‑4‑second end‑to‑end requirements, and let its engineering team focus on captioning quality rather than distribution.

VITAC

Joe Antonio

Chief Information Officer