The whole system costs about $11,000 or more. And a good captioner charges $100 per hour or more. It is definitely the most expensive captioning process of all. Many local TV stations, even if they can manage to get the money to buy the system, simply can not afford the recurring expense of the realtime captioner. For them the teleprompting/captioning system is a viable alternative solution.
Many captioners caption TV news from their office at home - with only a computer, software and a steno machine - hundreds of miles away from a TV station. The computer is connected through a telephone line to an encoder located at the TV station. The TV station feeds the news through the encoder before broadcasting. As the captioner watches the broadcast (via cable or satellite), he/she enters the words into the steno machine. The encoder receives the captions through the telephone line and combines the video with the captions. The time delay for this process is insignificant.