WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters has updated the Federal Communications Commission on some of the notable advances that have been made by the NextGen TV News Technology Lab program, an initiative to develop and test innovative applications of ATSC 3.0 technology for journalism, public safety, accessibility and community service that just celebrated its first birthday.

As recently reported by TV Tech’s Phil Kurz, the projects featured through the News Technology Lab provide a practical demonstration of how broadcasters are using NextGen TV capabilities to strengthen local service and enhance the viewer experience.

One of the notable projects from the Lab has been WJLA-TV's Advanced Emergency Information initiative, which explores how broadcasters can use NextGen TV technology to deliver more relevant, more accessible and more actionable emergency information to viewers.

"The project demonstrates how ATSC 3.0 can build upon broadcasting's longstanding role as a trusted source of emergency information by enabling capabilities that are simply not possible with ATSC 1.0,” the NAB told the FCC in a June 23 letter.

For example, ATSC 3.0 can support geographically targeted emergency communications and offer capabilities for providing “richer emergency information, including maps, images, evacuation routes, shelter information, and other contextual information that can help viewers understand developing emergency situations and make informed decisions,” the NAB said. “These capabilities are particularly valuable during severe weather events, AMBER Alerts, wildfires, flooding, and other emergencies where timely and actionable information can help protect lives and property.”

In addition, ATSC 3.0 enables important advances in accessibility. NextGen TV can support multilingual emergency communications, helping to ensure that critical information reaches more viewers during an emergency. It also supports enhanced accessibility features that can improve access to emergency information for viewers with disabilities.

“These capabilities represent meaningful public-interest benefits that will become increasingly important as broadcasters continue to deploy and refine NextGen TV services,” the NAB reported. “ATSC 3.0 also provides a foundation for additional public-interest services that extend beyond traditional television viewing. For example, broadcasters are actively exploring the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), which leverages ATSC 3.0 transmission infrastructure to provide a resilient terrestrial source of positioning, navigation, and timing information.”

The letter also address some of concerns in recent filings regarding alerting and certain receiver implementations.

In response, the NAB said that it “agrees that emergency information must remain reliable, accessible, and available to viewers. At the same time, it is important to distinguish between implementation-specific issues associated with particular devices and the capabilities of the ATSC 3.0 standard itself. The recent testing described in the record was limited to two receiver products and does not establish any inherent limitation of ATSC 3.0 emergency communications capabilities.”

“The existence of implementation issues in a limited number of first-generation devices should not obscure the broader public-interest benefits that ATSC 3.0 makes possible, particularly in the area of emergency communications,” the NAB argued. “The Commission should evaluate ATSC 3.0 not only by what it replaces, but by what it enables.”

“As the record continues to demonstrate, ATSC 3.0 is not merely a successor transmission standard,” the NAB concluded. “It is a platform for advanced emergency information, geographically targeted public warnings, multilingual communications, enhanced accessibility, resilient positioning and timing applications, and other innovative services that can strengthen broadcasting's service to local communities. Projects such as WJLA's Advanced Emergency Information initiative provide a concrete example of what becomes possible when broadcasters can fully utilize NextGen TV's capabilities.”

The full letter is available here.

It was not a big surprise when word came in late November that John Lawson was stepping down as the executive director of the AWARN Alliance.

(The alliance’s steering committee selected Dave Arland for the role. An interview with Arland is available here.)

A year ago in an interview, Lawson compared his effort to help get ATSC 3.0-based advanced emergency alerting and information (AEI) off the ground as being like “pushing a rock up a hill” and described his decision to try a “for-profit” approach to get the ball rolling while also continuing in his AWARN leadership role.

Now John has given up the alliance’s reins, and he has a few thoughts about his greatest achievements and biggest disappointments while leading AWARN.

On the positive side of the ledger, the most significant thing was the role advanced emergency alerting played in getting the Federal Communications Commission to give ATSC 3.0 the thumbs-up in November 2017. “We were definitely a factor in the commission’s approval of the ATSC 3.0 voluntary transition. It was a three-to-two vote. Every commissioner—even the two Democrats [Mignon Clyburn and future Chair Jessica Rosenworcel] who voted against it—talked about the public-service aspect of advanced alerting. Chairman [Ajit] Pai himself thanked me for giving him the ammunition to get the votes.”

Another important achievement was educating emergency managers about the problems 3.0-based AEI solves for them and building support for it among members of that community.

His biggest disappointment: “That AEI is not deployed widely in the United States and saving lives already.”

Lawson’s biggest hope for AEI is renewed interest among broadcasters. A year ago, station groups like Fox Television Stations and News-Press & Gazette had left the alliance, and Lawson was characterizing the broadcast industry—with a few notable exceptions—as having “dropped the ball” on AEI.

“Since the election, I’ve seen a new commitment by some broadcasters to really do something with 3.0. We could see a sea change there,” he says, cautioning, however, that when it comes to AEI what must be avoided is for “every station group to have to reinvent the wheel.” That is the role he hopes his new America’s Emergency Network company will fill.

“I’m very happy that the AWARN steering committee, of which I am a member, decided unanimously to keep AWARN going, and I really think that its role in terms of education, advocacy and networking between alerting authorities and broadcasters is a necessary complement for whatever happens on the private sector side,” he says.

“I think we [the AWARN Alliance] kept the torch alive for using broadcasting to save lives. It’s still burning, and I am confident that Dave Arland and the AWARN steering committee will find new directions to expand AWARN.”

WASHINGTON—John Lawson, longtime broadcast alerting advocate and founder of the AWARN Alliance, said he is stepping down as its executive director to work full-time in his position as co-founder of America’s Emergency Network LLC, which uses satellite and the ATSC 3.0 core network to interconnect alerting authorities to NextGen TV stations. Dave Arland, founder and president of PR firm Arland Communications, has been tapped as the new executive director, taking over when Lawson steps down at the end of the year.

AWARN (Advanced Warning and Response Network)—a coalition of broadcasters, device manufacturers and emergency management agencies tasked with developing advanced emergency alerting technology for ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV)—was founded in 2015 with Lawson as its first executive director. Lawson is also president of his own consulting firm Convergence Services, a strategic consulting firm focused on spectrum, resilience and next-generation broadcasting business model.

Although Lawson has been a strong advocate for emergency alerting, he has recently expressed frustration and skepticism about the broadcast industry’s transition to ATSC 3.0, calling out broadcasters for not doing enough to advance the technology.

“By and large, the broadcasters have not lived up to the promises that many of them made to the FCC in 2017 to stand up advanced alerting if the commission approved a voluntary transition to ATSC 3.0,” he told TV Tech last year.

His frustration grew after meetings with the FCC and local broadcasters, Lawson told TV Tech recently. Last spring, in an op-ed published on TVNewsCheck, he advocated for a government program that would provide discounts for 3.0 converter boxes, similar to the converter box coupon program in the transition from analog to ATSC 1.0 several decades ago.

Then he met with the FCC.

“Senior staff at the FCC told me that the broadcast industry had made it clear from the beginning, in their opinion, that the 3.0 transition was unlike the transition from analog to digital, and that it would be a purely market-driven approach,” he said. “And then I went out on the road so to speak to the Michigan Broadcast Engineering Conference I really got a dose of reality,” adding that no one raised their hand when he asked attendees if the 3.0 transition was “on the right track.”

“I’m proud of the work of the AWARN Alliance to foster the use of ATSC 3.0 for advanced emergency messaging, which creates a powerful use case for NextGen TV,” Lawson said, thanking the AWARN Alliance’s core group of commercial and public broadcasters and technology companies that “grasp the life-saving power of NextGen TV alerting.”

Arland brings decades of industry experience and expertise in lobbying, communications and strategy to his new role at the AWARN Alliance. He continues to lead his consulting firm, Arland Communications, and serves as executive director of the Indiana Broadcasters Association.

“The AWARN Alliance itself is John Lawson’s legacy, and all of us owe him an enormous debt of gratitude,” AWARN Alliance Chairman John I. Taylor said. “Similarly, we are very fortunate to have the well-respected and talented Dave Arland to lead us into the future.”

Counter to sensationalist headlines, linear television remains the best starting point for driving reach. However, with each passing day, linear supply shrinks as viewers shift to streaming. Fewer linear impressions means that advertisers need to spend more on other platforms to drive reach, moving dollars from their traditional linear budget to these other channels and tactics.

Enter linear addressable.

According to who you ask, we are either on the precipice of national broadcast addressable capabilities or we have already arrived, effectively opening 14 minutes of publisher-controlled inventory to one-to-one delivery. This means that publishers have a vast array of inventory newly available to them, as they can now sell and addressably deliver an ad spot that is traditionally bought by one advertiser to dozens or even hundreds of advertisers.

A Significant Leap
Today, this technological advance is discussed primarily as a mechanism for precision ad delivery, increasing the accuracy of audience targeting tactics. Over the past decade or so, linear television has slowly advanced beyond age/sex transactions towards advanced audience targeting with data driven linear, and addressable capabilities will provide a significant leap over even that.

But while this precision targeting is an important offering for publishers and value-added for advertisers, it remains only half of the equation. Addressable advertising needs to be conceptualized as part of a larger advertising purchase, driving both precision targeting and incremental reach to complement the traditional linear plan.

As linear TV reach continues to compress and frequency expands, it becomes more important for publishers to ensure that addressable impressions are reaching either people who will not be exposed to the brand’s linear campaign or have light levels of frequency.

To achieve that, we can take one of two paths: We can use a standard segmentation, like targeting light network viewers for addressable impressions. But the challenge with this is inventory supply; by definition, networks have limited impression supply among light network viewers.

Predictive Forecasting
The other approach would be forecasting exposure levels at a campaign-specific level. Through predictive forecasting at a campaign level, brands will have a larger pool of inventory for addressable targeting, returning value to the publisher, and ensuring truly incremental addressable impressions to a given campaign, returning value to the advertiser.

In our tests comparing these methodologies, we found that forecasting unexposed/low exposed viewers to a specific moderate-size network campaign created almost double the remainder audience for incremental targeting compared to a traditional light and medium network viewers’ audience. So it seems like this is a win-win for both the sell and buy side. 

The fact that campaign-level targeting offers greater inventory to utilize makes logical media sense: just because someone watches linear TV a “medium viewer” amount, does not guarantee their exposure to a specific ad campaign. And just because someone is designated a light TV viewer does not mean they won’t have received several exposures to a specific ad campaign.

Publishers, to maximize the value that linear addressable offers, need to shift from using addressable to deliver precisely in target and to start using it to deliver precisely and incrementally. While standard segmentation is a step in the correct direction, we at datafuelX enable predictive forecasting at a campaign-specific level, returning the best value to both publishers and advertisers.

The author is CEO and chief technology officer for Kybernetix.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee has developed standard A/331, called Advanced Emergency Alerting.

The XML format can vary by country and is flexible. Options include CAP or the EDXL protocols alongside encryption, but a minimum of a PC level processor is required (e.g., 486).

A/331 does not meet the system latency for Earthquake Early Warning System alerts of 3 seconds or less, and could be improved in the U.S. implementation.

The A/331 protocol is carried on the highest power level of the Layered Division Multiplex modulation, which is QPSK, giving it the greatest range and a receive capability by small antennae in smartphones. That received QPSK data is usable for TV on smartphones. The lower levels of the protocol use IP or related standards, which is broadcast in South Korea TV.

A/331 does not meet the system latency for Earthquake Early Warning System alerts of three seconds or less, and could be improved in the U.S. implementation. The possibilities for smartphones to receive alerts include WEA, AEA, social media and alerting vendors, among other sources.

To avoid alert fatigue, developing definitions and software is imperative. One goal could be having a maximum of two alerts for life endangering messages and one for others, and several manufacturers are working on this, including Verance.

WEA is using single-level cellular broadcast including Femto (10 m), Pico (200 m), micro (1 km) up to macrocells (up to 10 km). While macrocells are expected to have generator backup, Femto and Pico cells most likely do not. During an extended power outage, the macro cell service restricts the number of supported calls. For cell broadcast alerting, the loss of power would mean the loss of alert area polygon selection. With macrocells, the selectivity should be implemented in the handset based on relative location and transmitted the polygon data.

During Hurricane Sandy, which primarily affected the New Jersey, New York and Connecticut area, only one New Jersey broadcaster went off the air; residents could easily tune to another station. Likewise, during Hurricane Katrina, a few broadcasters in New Orleans went off the air (one was a Spanish-language radio station).

Having multilingual capabilities for EAS is important when communicating emergencies. While Text-To Speech is useful, there are situations in which the pronunciation or meaning is mistaken due to numerous languages. The inclusion of the International Phonetic Alphabet as part of the ASCII text and part of other worldwide alphabets would be beneficial and simplify processing.

A/331 does not add any improvements for the implementation of EAS to legacy broadcasting radio and TV, nor for cable, fiber (e.g. FiOS), DBS (e.g. DirecTV or DISH Network) or SDARS (SiriusXM). An improved EAS is needed and a proposal has been made that addresses most limitations of the present system, especially radio.

KYBERNETIX

A Kybernetix proposal discussed with FEMA addresses a majority of those limitations, and the implementations vary between HD Radio (or other digital radio) and other TV systems.

Certain specifications and operations are implemented in the receiver, which is primarily using software on a suitable processor including the following: an 8-bit microcontroller for less cost, less power consumption and less electromagnetic interference generation, which is important for radios that have the antennae within the radio.

Because of varying CAP profiles and language or location/jurisdiction systems, the implementation of AEA would vary by country; the improved EAS is without these limitations. A country code would define the jurisdiction ID system. A coding system provides for varying languages where a maximum of six per country is suggested for practical international and technical implementation; two being local languages, and the others multinational.

A Digital Daisy Mesh is important for redundancy. This consists of two (or more) regional primary stations with monitoring receivers at other broadcasters that can function as system quality control monitors reporting to the State Emergency Communications Committee. With the large coverage area typical of TV broadcast and considerable bandwidth for multiple languages and data transmission, these would make the best primary stations. Currently, radio stations function as the primaries with the existing EAS. The analog modem tones are the data transmission and contain only the message header and tail; HD Radio data transmission capabilities are not utilized. Analog modem tones could not add area selection polygons or the message text.

Though ATSC 3.0 would use AEA, translating to an improved EAS would be simple, as defined for CAP. The transmission of the EDXLs and other file formats are possible without disturbing the public.

A worldwide standard is preferable for consumer electronics manufacturers. CAP is in process of becoming an ITU standard X.1303. Kybernetix considers this in the definition development for an improved EAS standard.

The least cost to consumers always is desirable, and approximately two cents for about 1 MB of additional memory is expected to be the requirement; a discrete 1 MB USB flash memory costs around 50 cents. With suitable encoder/decoders installed, the cost of an upgrade to the system for a radio station should be limited to a software upgrades plus digital broadcast receivers with a data output for the Digital Daisy Mesh.

PROBLEMS TO ADDRESS

One major problem for EAS is the ability to selectively deliver an alert within a broadcast coverage area. With HD Radio, everyone in the affected area would be force-tuned to the analog signal, except those listeners allowed to opt out of the message; they would be able to continue with the HD signal. If the alert is for everyone, then all signals are switched to alert. Not all radio transmitters support a –15 dBr or higher injection level of HD data carrier because of intermodulation becoming excessive.

Another problem is how to rapidly deliver EEW messages. There are check-sums built in. The first data transmission is not delayed, and if validated, and the receiver is selected, this would start a playback of the warning tones and the word “EARTHQUAKE” from receiver memory. Subsequent reception of the audio (having the HD delay) provides further alerting and information as previously described. This process means that the alert audio allows for analog degradation and single language selection normally, thus accommodating radio stations not set up for Digital Daisy Mesh.

Current EAS event codes do not provide a prioritization scheme in terms of timeouts or immediate override. Permitting a timeout scheme would enable interaction between the encoder/decoder and the automation system. When data regarding the duration of the alert is provided, a trigger to the playout of alternative content (e.g. PSAs) of identical duration on receivers without the alert becomes possible.

Improvements have been made, but more are needed. None so far have addressed issues that require permitting changes to the present definition of EAS. The use of a selectivity mechanism is not permitted, nor is the proposed latency reduction for an EEW.

Other limitations exist: 1) The ability to selectively deliver alerts to first responders using a temporary additional HD Radio stream on selected broadcasters via agreement; and 2) The ability to use AEA as a source for a Digital Daisy Mesh, for which requires testing and debugging prior to deployment is recommended.

If all these changes are made, the improved EAS would be a valuable system. For more information, go to http://kynx.us.

Frank W. Bell holds two patents, has worked in telecom and consumer electronics and has participated in engineering the launch of 21 TV signals. He also worked in facility recovery after 9/11.