Websites’ Interest in Accessing New FEMA Site May Bring EAS to More Platforms

Google is among websites that has expressed a tentative interest in getting the alerts from FEMA’s integrated public alert and warning system, agency officials said on an IPAWS webinar last week (CD June 8 p6) and industry officials told us this week. Broadcast officials and vendors of alerting gear to traditional EAS participants told us the agency will start in a few months the publicly accessible version of IPAWS to pass along alerts in the new Common Alerting Protocol format for all FCC EAS participants: Every radio and TV station and all subscription-video providers and satellite radio. All EAS participants by June 30 must be able to get and receive warnings of natural disasters and other events in CAP, which the commission issued a reminder about in Tuesday’s roundup of actions (http://xrl.us/bnbk2b).

There’s limited content available on FEMA’s website, so the full panoply of alerts that EAS participants get can’t be accessed by Internet Protocol, industry officials noted. IPAWS Open has signed up 24 municipal, state and federal agencies including the National Weather Service, and a few dozen requests are pending, the agency’s website said (http://xrl.us/bnbkzr). EAS vendors said they're encouraging municipalities when they need to upgrade equipment to purchase CAP gear so their alerts can be included in FEMA’s feed. EAS “`participants must have deployed operational equipment’ that is capable of receiving and processing” CAP-formatted “EAS alerts in a manner consistent with the Commission’s EAS rules” by month’s end, said a Public Safety Bureau notice. “This means any necessary equipment must be installed and operational by that date."

It may be a little while before alerts are widely distributed online through privately owned sites, but there seems to be sustained interest by Internet companies, industry officials said. “Some of the social media sites have been flirting with the idea of somehow interfacing with IPAWS,” said Senior Director Edward Czarnecki of EAS vendor Monroe Electronics. Websites would need to know where users are, such as through using location-based services, so alerts could be geographically targeted and consumers wouldn’t be overwhelmed with warnings about faraway locations, said Czarnecki and Maine Association of Broadcasters President Suzanne Goucher. Czarnecki noted that social media products often “already know where their customers are.” Some companies in that area are considering giving to users “the possibility of getting certain critical alerts to them, at their desktop or on their screen,” he said. FCC and FEMA officials had no comment.

Google has spoken to EAS players about its possible interest, but there don’t appear to have been further developments, some executives said. FEMA officials mentioned that company and AOL and Pandora as other websites that are interested in accessing the EAS warnings on the IPAWS Open website. Spokespeople for AOL, Google and other major websites had no comment. “There are a number of large and small players” considering getting the IPAWS Open feed, Czarnecki said. But Goucher said the first she'd heard of such interest was at last week’s FEMA webinar, which she helped run. Sites would need to give visitors ways to opt in or out of alerts, she noted.

Pandora isn’t now interested in accessing the alerts, a spokeswoman said. “This is an important issue, but right now we're really focused on establishing technology neutral royalty rates.” The website that streams music and pays performance royalties wants to be on equal footing with terrestrial radio stations that don’t pay royalties. “Unlike broadcast radio, Pandora is not granted the free spectrum that brings the obligation to offer the emergency alert system,” said Chief Strategy Officer Tim Westergren. “Nonetheless, if Congress were to level the playing field so that all forms of radio were held to the same royalty standard, we would sign up for providing the same emergency warning services that broadcast radio provides."

"The more pathways, the merrier” for alerts to be sent to Americans, said Goucher. That needs to be balanced with “not bombarding people with irrelevant alerts,” which is the “chief concern” as she sees it, Goucher said. In Maine, “probably the big newspaper websites would want it, and the news aggregator websites,” she predicted. The state is among several that are participating in the IPAWS Open site, FEMA data show. For now, the interest in accessing the site among Web companies is being driven by “the big guys, Google and Yahoo and those folks,” Goucher said. “It may take a while for it to trickle down.” Months perhaps but not years, said an industry executive who’s heard of the website interest. “The way this is going in the future is more rich-media content” that’s enabled by CAP, he said: Website interest is part of the next-generation of EAS.