The FCC needs to address the gap in multilingual emergency communications systems, the Minority Media and Telecom Council said in a letter to the chief of the Public Safety Bureau Thursday (http://bit.ly/15ORQA0). MMTC said it first asked the FCC to address the issue in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which struck in 2005. MMTC President David Honig said current FCC emergency communication procedures “cannot ensure that multilingual emergency warnings will reach those without access to mobile phones or other non-broadcast devices, since an emergency may silence a market’s only multilingual station.” Honig said the EAS test report released last month (CD April 16 p5) was focused only on English speakers. “This omission could prove deadly for non-English speaking U.S. residents,” Honig said. He said FCC efforts to provide emergency alerts for non-English speakers should include detailed information beyond simple alerts, including directions on where to find shelter and food and when it might be safe to return. “Before the 2013 hurricane season begins, the Commission should take up and rule on the Katrina Petition,” Honig said.
The comparatively low cost of mobile DTV will give terrestrial broadcasters a “significant advantage” over streaming TV services like Aereo, stakeholders said Thursday at the Advanced TV Systems Committee annual meeting. Representatives from mobile DTV providers Dyle and Mobile 500 Alliance said mobile TV technology’s comparatively low cost and reliable coverage was one of several advantages that would keep broadcasters competitive with wireless carriers.
The FCC is asking the states to review and update their Emergency Alert System plans to make sure they comply with the agency’s rules, said a public notice from the commission’s Public Safety Bureau Thursday (http://bit.ly/ZYhmhc). The notice to the State Emergency Communication Committees (SECCs) is in response to one of the recommendations that came out of a report on the FCC and Federal Emergency Management Agency’s first-ever nationwide EAS test in 2011 (CD April 16 p5). The new notice said all state EAS plans must be up to date, filed with the FCC, and must include a “computer readable” data table showing monitoring assignments and “the specific primary and backup path” for emergency messages, “from the Primary Entry Point (PEP) to each station in the plan.” The agency also requires states that can initiate messages using the Common Alerting Protocol to include monitoring and distribution specifics for those messages in their EAS plans. In a separate order Thursday (http://bit.ly/163m81q), the bureau also allowed 15 stations that had previously filed requests for waivers of the commission’s CAP requirements to withdraw them. “These fifteen petitioners all state that they are now either in compliance with [the CAP requirement] or are no longer in operation,” said the order.
The FCC denied an application for review and found Ely Radio liable for an $11,000 fine for violations concerning an antenna structure in Winnemucca, Nev. As former owner of antenna structure number 1005854, Ely Radio in Minnesota failed to ensure the structure “exhibited the required obstruction lighting” and failed to make sure its registration with the commission was appropriately updated “to reflect a change in ownership,” the commission said in an order (http://bit.ly/15XWxGN). The Enforcement Bureau reasonably determined that Ely was the antenna structure owner and, therefore, “was responsible for the violations at issue here,” it said. The commission also affirmed the Enforcement Bureau’s decision to deny Mt. Rushmore Broadcasting’s petition for reconsideration of a $17,500 forfeiture. Mt. Rushmore, of Casper, Wyo., failed to ensure the operational readiness of the emergency alert system equipment for two of its radio stations, didn’t maintain a complete public inspection file for those stations and failed to operate an aural studio-transmitter-link from its licensed location, the FCC said in an order (http://bit.ly/14lQiww).
"All of Comcast’s cable systems are now CAP compliant,” because they have the “broadband connectivity” needed to get common alerting protocol announcements, it told the FCC in updating a waiver petition. The company was among operators that asked for waivers of a June 30, 2012, deadline for being able to receive emergency alert system warnings in that newer format (CD Sept 11 p1) that uses the Internet and not the broadcast daisy-chain to send out alerts. In June, “a handful of its smallest, most remote cable systems” lacked “the broadband connectivity necessary to monitor for CAP alerts,” and so a waiver was sought, the company said in a filing to the Public Safety Bureau (http://bit.ly/17jGeAc). After seeking an extension to Feb. 28, 2013, Comcast became compliant with the emergency warning rules “with a satellite-based delivery solution through EMnet” and completed that in February, said the filing Monday in docket 04-296.
There were failures among many types of emergency alert system participants and at many levels in the so-called daisy chain distributing EAS warnings, the FCC said sixteen months after the first nationwide simulation. There’s a “Need for Additional Rulemakings” and other steps by the commission and Federal Emergency Management Agency before another test is held, said one subsection heading of the Public Safety Bureau report. The study sought a “re-examination” of FCC state EAS plan rules, with some plans not providing enough details about alert propagation, said the report. EAS stakeholders we spoke with said they generally backed its recommendations and found it a useful document even so long after the Nov. 9, 2011, test. Members of Congress were among those who had scrutinized the results and sought such an autopsy (CD Nov 18/11 p1).
LAS VEGAS -- Global interoperability and spectrum efficiency need to be the biggest cornerstones of any next-generation broadcast system if terrestrial broadcasters want to retake valuable competitive ground lost to wireless carriers, streaming services and other content-delivery rivals, various speakers said Sunday at the NAB Show’s Broadcast Engineering Conference. Though terrestrial Ultra HD and 3D TV are on the list of desired features of the next-gen system, they're nowhere as high on the priority scale as other attributes like mobility or interactivity, or so it appeared from the many speakers who gave presentations at the conference.
Requirements for video descriptions from emergency on-screen crawls haven’t changed much from what was in an FCC draft that has been circulating for a month (CD March 11 p3), said agency and industry officials. They said in interviews Thursday that the draft Media Bureau order and further NPRM hasn’t been controversial among the agency’s members, and a public-interest official said it may be approved largely intact. He said he hopes the further notice on Internet Protocol programming sent by MVPDs to connected devices in a pay-TV household gets a section added on accessibility of emergency crawls to those with both sight and hearing impairments.
The NAB is talking up the mobile DTV technology that will be on display at its annual show in Las Vegas in April. It spotlighted a half-dozen exhibitors -- Decontis, DTVInteractive, Dyle, Mobile Emergency Alert System, the Mobile500 Alliance and Rentrak -- that will be displaying mobile DTV wares at the show’s Mobile DTV Pavilion. “Mobile TV holds promise for consumers and broadcasters as video on-the-go becomes increasingly in demand and data plan consumption charges become more expensive for consumers,” NAB Executive Vice President Rick Kaplan said.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee approved the specifications for a mobile emergency alert system to be delivered using the ATSC A/153 Mobile Digital TV standard. The M-EAS enhancements to the standard will provide capabilities for delivering multimedia alerts “to mobile DTV-equipped cellphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks and in-car navigation systems,” ATSC said in a press release (http://bit.ly/YIqeD3). Using mobile DTV for emergency alerting “requires no additional spectrum and is an additional use of existing TV transmitters and towers,” it said. M-EAS is backwards compatible and will not affect the performance of mobile TV products already in consumer hands, it said. Partners in the M-EAS effort said that completion of the standardization will lead to the implementation of the system and commercialization of the equipment (CD Feb 26 p8).