Last month, Aberdeen celebrated a significant company milestone – our 20^th anniversary! The Aberdeen team, along with past employees, friends, and family, gathered at our office where our parking lot was transformed into a campground-themed party to help bring the company back to that night when Matt, Becky, and Amy sat around a campfire and imagined starting the company together.

The party featured live music, wood-fired pizza, an obstacle course for the kids, basketball, table tennis, miniature golf, and of course, a campfire.

Here’s Matt Cook with a walkthrough:

Company Milestones

2001

Aberdeen Captioning was founded by Matt, Becky, and Amy Cook.

• Number of Clients: 7
• Number of Employees: 3

2002

The National Religious Broadcaster’s (NRB) convention, known in the industry as “the largest gathering of Christian communication professionals,” was held in Nashville, TN. The team landed the captioning work for 2 large ministries (still clients!) at this show, setting the company in motion to grow to where it is today. The NRB convention would immediately prove to be one of the most important and valuable events attended every year.

2006

A new FCC requirement for closed captioning leads to a massive growth year in our low-cost live-to-tape service.

• Number of Clients: 145
• Number of Employees: 6

2007

EEG introduces its IP-based captioning software, iCap. This technology would eventually improve the connectivity and audio quality shortcomings of modem-based hardware and further improve live captioning accuracy.

2009

In April, the team drove to Las Vegas, NV, to join over 1500 other exhibitors at the Nation Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show.

2010

Aberdeen purchases its first license to Telestream’s Vantage transcoding software to explore a move to digital files and put an end to tape.

2011

Tests with Vantage were successful and led to the launch of our Dallas data center and marked the start of our AberFast Digital File Delivery service.

• Number of Clients: 237
• Number of Employees: 10

2012

Now expanded beyond just a captioning company, Aberdeen Captioning is rebranded as Aberdeen Broadcast Services. The three divisions of broadcast services are given names: AberCap, AberFast, and Aberlingo. The rebranding came complete with a new logo (the paper airplane) and a refresh of the website.

2013-14

The immediate success of AberFast generated buzz around the industry and grabbed the attention of some large programmers. Several more top clients are added to help add significant growth.

2016

TBN announced a partnership with the Sydney-based international congregation Hillsong Church that rebranded The Church Channel as the Hillsong Channel—a network devoted to its ministry, teaching, and worship music. Aberdeen became the exclusive captioning and delivery partner of the channel.

• Number of Clients: 379
• Number of Employees: 33

2017

The “Dallas Meltdown” led to the urgent need to look elsewhere for redundant cloud computing, landing on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry’s gold standard. The growth and scale that AWS offers lead Aberdeen to hire an in-house development team for R&D of the technologies in place today.

2020

The pandemic hits and live business doubles.

2021

A new AWS transcoding factory is built around Vantage 8 and workflows and processes are simplified with integration into Salesforce. Vantage workflows were reduced from 3,500 to less than 400.

Aberdeen launches AberFast Lite, our terrestrial IP-based program delivery method which is an alternative to satellite delivery for video producers sending a single-version program to 50+ TV stations.