A sign of the uncertainty facing state regulators during the IP transition came Sunday when District of Columbia Public Service Commission Management Analyst Cary Hinton asked an FCC official who would handle consumer complaints during the upcoming trials. The FCC order made a lot of presumptions, Hinton said on a panel at NARUC’s winter meeting that dealt with the transition, from what happens with phone numbers to 911. The FCC Jan. 30 approved such IP transition test beds (CD Jan 31 p1).
The House Homeland Security Committee unanimously approved the National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act (HR-3696) Wednesday, advancing the bill to the full House. The bill, supported by both parties’ committee leadership, would codify the Department of Homeland Security’s existing public-private collaboration on cybersecurity issues without extending the agency’s powers. The bill would also allow critical infrastructure companies to seek liability protections under the Support Anti-terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies Act (SAFETY) Act for cybersecurity efforts.
Federal agencies remain underprepared to defend their own information systems against most cyberthreats, said Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee Tuesday. Committee Republicans, led by ranking member Tom Coburn, R-Okla., released a report outlining “real lapses by the federal government” on internal cybersecurity, even as the government has taken on a larger role in protecting the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure components. Cybersecurity experts told us that federal agencies need to improve their own cybersecurity, but said the report doesn’t give a complete picture of the situation, and risks politicizing the cybersecurity issue.
The “Pay-TV industry” should be held accountable for increasing consumer bills, said a newly formed coalition of broadcasters, broadcasting associations, affiliate groups and broadcasting related organizations, called TVfreedom.org. The group supports rules that would mandate refunds to the subscribers of multichannel video programming distributors for programming black-outs, reduce “unnecessary and questionable fees” on bills, and “protect content providers from the use of their lawful content by others without fair compensation,” a release said. Retransmission consent lets broadcasters provide their communities with “local news, as well as emergency alerts, severe weather updates, public health advisories and details on time-sensitive public safety-related incidents,” said the release. “TVfreedom.org will tell the truth about the state of the video marketplace and call out the Pay-TV industry’s inside-the-beltway gamesmanship designed solely to increase their record profits,” said TVfreedom.org Director-Public Affairs Robert Kenny in the release. Membership in the new organization includes the affiliate associations of ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS, Journal Broadcast Group, TVB, NAB, the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, Bounce-TV and others. “Consumers would ultimately benefit from a system where cable and satellite TV providers fairly compensate all channels based on the ratings, popularity and quality of the programming that each channel provides to viewers,” said the new group. TVfreedom.org’s website goes live Tuesday.
There’s a labor cost to users to make software and settings changes to emergency alert system devices, said EAS equipment firm Sage Alerting Systems. The FCC should strive “to give sufficient warning of required changes, and bundle them together, so users can schedule updates to EAS equipment in a cost effective manner,” Sage said in an ex parte filing in docket 04-296 (http://bit.ly/1d7FEHZ). If the national periodic test (NPT) code is kept as a normal EAS alert, the Federal Emergency Management Agency can use it to verify transport of messages through various parts of the system, it said. Making the NPT work just like an emergency action notification (EAN) with special handling and no time limit would require a software update for all Sage devices and all EAS devices, Sage said. “The FCC and FEMA should work together [to] define the use case before changes are made to the [NPT] specification.” The filing recounted a teleconference with Sage President Harold Price and Public Safety Bureau staff. Monroe Electronics urged the commission to establish a requirement for EAS equipment to recognize, process and validate all header codes for EAS alerts, “even where the event code is EAN,” said the EAS equipment provider in an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/LfcEIA). Monroe supports using a new national location code of “000000,” it said. It said that if the rules were modified to specify that the NPT must also support unlimited audio, “a significant software update would need to be developed and provided by the manufacturer, and then installed by many thousands of users at their own volition.” The filing pertains to a conference call with bureau staff. Separately Wednesday, the FCC said that Turner Broadcasting is apparently liable for a $200,000 fine for airing false EAS tones. (See story above in this issue.)
Through fines proposed on Turner Broadcasting and a consent decree with MMK, licensee of a Kentucky TV station, the FCC Enforcement Bureau is sending a message to broadcasters and distributors that it’s cracking down on use of simulated emergency alert system sounds, said broadcast attorneys who follow EAS in interviews Wednesday. The actions follow an enforcement advisory by the FCC that cautioned against false and unauthorized use of the EAS attention signal (CD Nov 7 p15).
Emergency alert system experts called for an AM band “resurrection” as part of the FCC’s AM revitalization effort. The commission should enforce Part 15 of FCC rules for the AM band, which governs unlicensed communication transmissions, the Broadcast Warning Working Group said in comments in docket 13-249 (http://bit.ly/1grK80S). Stations that previously had “listenable” signals “have seen their audiences gradually stolen by all types of electronic noise that are the result of the commission not treating the intentional and unintentional radiators of that noise as Part 15 devices and applying strong enforcement to the offenders,” it said. Continued allowance of technologies like broadband Internet over power lines contributes to the problem, it said. Part 15 should be amended to make it clear that unintentional radiators, like long-wire antennas used to broadcast harmonic noise based on high tension power distribution, are held accountable for the harmful interference caused to the AM band, BWWG said. The group also urged the FCC to take action to end overmodulation of AM transmitter carriers, which “creates harmful interference to adjacent channels."
Broadcaster associations in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia urged the FCC to take a flexible approach to the presentation of emergency information to the public and to require that during emergency alert system (EAS) activations, all cable systems pass through TV programming “that makes weather-related and other emergency information available to viewers,” they said in joint reply comments in docket 04-296 (http://bit.ly/1bDy5Zo). Reply comments on the first nationwide EAS test were due this week (CD Nov 12 p8). Cable systems undermine the efforts of local stations to provide their communities with this critical information “when cable systems choose to override local programming with other content during EAS activations,” they said. NCTA urged the Public Safety Bureau to consider the technical and operational costs and challenges posed by proposed changes to the EAS protocol for EAS participants before it makes recommendations for FCC action, it said (http://bit.ly/1bRDmjq). Cable operators “need to retain the ability to make the selective override decision where it is technically feasible and makes sense for their customers,” it said. Cable operators typically don’t have the ability to create or edit closed captioning streams and pass through closed captioning exactly as it’s received, it said. NCTA also urged the commission to reject DirecTV’s suggestion of formalizing use of the Washington, D.C., location code, it said. The American Cable Association cautioned against additional regulatory mandates that require its members to buy, replace or modify equipment to ensure compliance, ACA said (http://bit.ly/18oBvlF). The association supports efforts to ensure the readability of EAS alerts, it said. But the bureau must develop a full understanding of the costs involved in standardizing diverse character generator systems, and consider alternatives “before recommending that the commission impose inflexible readability mandates,” it said. Hearst said it supports a longer nationwide test. Another important set of data may be revealed if the next test is longer than two minutes, “namely data associated with the time-out limitations programmed into most EAS gear,” it said (http://bit.ly/19HSfQF).
"A large majority” of the nation’s broadcasters will sit out the TV incentive spectrum auction, NAB Executive Vice President Rick Kaplan predicted Tuesday during a webinar sponsored by the Digital Policy Institute. Kaplan, a former FCC Wireless Bureau chief, also questioned why the FCC continues to push for a 2014 auction. Preston Padden, head of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, said the auction should be a success as long as the FCC gets the rules right.
It’s up to broadcasters to embrace the nascent rollout of mobile DTV, with the expense of adding equipment to transmit to portable consumer electronics using that standard being minor compared with the opportunity cost of not “lighting up,” said advocates of the technology. One backer told us he’s frustrated at the pace of adoption, while others said in interviews last week and at an NAB event that they expect more stations to adopt the technology. “Mobile TV is already available in nearly 40 markets serving approximately 60 percent of the U.S. population,” said NAB incentive auction pointman Rick Kaplan at the event Wednesday. “This is all before mobile TV proponents have ever launched a large-scale coordinated promotional campaign.”