The FCC seems poised to propose rules for broadcasters to help non-English language stations knocked off-air during emergencies transmit emergency alert system messages, said industry and other EAS observers. They said that the Public Safety Bureau issued a public notice now on a 2005 proposal for such a designated-hitter backup plan from groups including the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council is among indications FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wants to act. Wheeler, on the other hand, may not have made up his mind, and the item could also be used to surface industry opposition to requiring multilingual alerts by radio and TV stations, said an EAS expert. That view was in the minority among those we interviewed Wednesday.
Maine Public Broadcasting Network will deploy a public safety broadcasting service based on Triveni Digital’s SkyScraper DTV content distribution system. MPBN plans to use the system to deliver real-time emergency alert system messages, Triveni said in a news release Monday. The messages will include audio and video originating from the Maine Emergency Management Agency headquarters to every broadcast operation center in Maine, “providing TV and radio stations with immediate information to relay to their viewers and listeners,” Triveni said. SkyScraper offers a highly scalable end-to-end environment “that supports point-to-multipoint digital media content distribution, with targeted point-to-point delivery,” it said.
The FCC Technological Advisory Council plans to make cybersecurity a key focus for 2014, helping the agency sort through the role it can play, officials said Monday during the initial TAC meeting of the year. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler formerly chaired TAC.
The FCC proposed fines totaling $1.9 million against Disney’s ESPN, Viacom and Comcast’s NBCUniversal for repeatedly transmitting a movie trailer that misused the emergency alert system tones. The EAS allegations stemmed from consumer complaints last year about a “No Surrender Trailer” for the movie Olympus Has Fallen, the FCC said. The companies admitted to airing the trailer multiple times, claiming they took action by revising their advertisement review guidelines and ceasing to carry the ads after letters of inquiry (LOI) and advisories from the commission. The commission proposed a $1.1 million fine for Viacom, a $530,000 fine for NBCUniversal and $280,000 for ESPN. The agency last month proposed fining Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting and others over similar EAS violations in what industry attorneys called a crackdown (CD Jan 16 p7), which they said Monday appears to have continued.
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).