Emergency Video Description FCC Draft Little Changed as Members Vote on It

CEA doesn’t want any tentative conclusions in the further notice, a CEA executive reported telling an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. The draft tentatively said MVPD’s IP streams should be subject to the rules, agency officials have said. The FNPRM should “explain fully the legal theories on which it bases its questions,” CEA said (http://bit.ly/YifkIz). “Stand-alone removable media players should not be covered by the new apparatus rules for emergency information and video description."

So far, a 5-0 vote on the item is likely before the April 9 statutory deadline for some of the rules contained in the draft to be adopted, and some FCC members have approved it, said commission and industry officials. They said if that lack of contention changes, it would likely happen next week, when many officials working on the rules return from spring vacation. The order circulated Feb. 28 would require mobile DTV products and DVR and Blu-ray players to be able to pass on audio narratives of warnings originally rendered on the screens of TV station and multichannel video programming distributors, FCC officials have said. Commercial video equipment and display-only monitors such as those used only with computers wouldn’t fall under the rules, agency officials said.

TV licensees would be responsible for converting what’s in the crawls into secondary audio programming channels, and the SAP content would need to be available to users of the consumer electronics, agency officials have said. Broadcasters and MVPDs would get some leeway to not have to repeat on SAP every crawl run on the screen for events that aren’t emergencies, such as school closings and bus cancelations, agency and industry officials said. But they said both types of licenses don’t get as much time as some sought to comply. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.

There haven’t been many lobbying meetings on the rules, which are required under 2010’s 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, agency and industry officials said. Those that lobbied bureau and eighth-floor officials on the rules in the second half of March were the American Cable Association, CTIA (CD March 21 p16), CEA and NCTA, filings in docket 12-107 show. ACA wants leniency for small cable systems and those not in all-digital, and NCTA sees the act as limiting what the agency can do (http://bit.ly/10W0hF2, http://bit.ly/XkQTe7). “Hybrid analog-digital systems that lack the equipment necessary to encode or pass through broadcast SAP on their analog service” should be able to give eligible subscribers free set-top boxes for up to three analog TVs, ACA reported telling aides to commissioners Ajit Pai and Jessica Rosenworcel, and front-office bureau officials, during meetings last week (http://bit.ly/10hEzrh, http://bit.ly/ZDMO3p).

TV stations need more than the two years in the draft to comply, because the crawls with information on bad weather, disasters and other events aren’t texts per se that can be converted into speech through existing equipment, said a broadcast lawyer. Instead, such displays are graphic, and vendors need at least 18 months to design gear capable of turning that into information that can go into a SAP channel, said the attorney. Many stations lack an SAP channel, and would need to add one to comply with the rules, said the official. The American Council of the Blind and American Foundation for the Blind “rejected the notion that all emergency alerts are transmitted as an image,” ACB said in a January filing in the docket (http://bit.ly/11Ttboa). An ACB official had no comment now.

"It didn’t sound like much was going to happen” in terms of major changes to the order versus what was in the draft, said Blake Reid, a lawyer at Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation whose clients include the National Association of the Deaft and Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. He hopes a further notice asks about “a solution that accommodates the deaf/blind community,” such as by putting information from the emergency crawl into the closed captioning stream, he said.