WASHINGTON—Two local television stations in the nation’s capital will conduct an eight week trial of ATSC 3.0’s advanced emergency warning capabilities, including text-based alerts and rich media, and the workflow needed to support the alerts, said Lane Michaelsen, Group News director at the Sinclair Broadcast Group during a June 23 webinar on NextGen TV alerting. 

WJLA, Sinclair’s ABC affiliate, and WTTG, the Fox O&O, in Washington, D.C., will take part in the trial. As of this moment, no start date has been identified, he said.

“We’ve spoken to the people there [at WTTG], and we’ve obviously spoken to the people at Sinclair to create a test environment so we can create a workflow that we can distribute to our partners—a workflow that we know works,” said Michaelsen.

The trial will occur in four two-week blocks. During the first two weeks, the stations will conduct four scheduled tests per day in four different time periods. These will be text-only alerts. “The idea here is that we hit multiple people on multiple schedules,” he said.

The second two-week block will see the addition of real alerts to the scheduled tests during four different time periods. Once again, these tests will be text-only, said Michaelsen.

The third two-week block will include daily scheduled and real alerts during the four time periods. They will consist of text and limited media. The last two weeks of the trial will see the addition of rich media, including maps and video, he said.

Michaelsen made his presentation during “NextGen TV 201: Advanced Emergency Alerting, News and Information,” a webinar presented by the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) in partnership with the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance.

Other speakers included John Lawson, president of Convergence Services and executive director of the AWARN Alliance, Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC, and Jim DeChant, vice president of Technology at News-Press & Gazette. 

Michaelsen discussed the efforts of Sinclair to develop a next-gen emergency alerting workflow. “We want the system to interact with current systems in our newsrooms … because not every single newsroom works on the Avid iNews system, not every newsroom edits with the same platform,” he said.

The goal for the workflow is to not add significantly to the existing workload of producers and reporters. Michaelsen envisions taking the work that is already being done and allowing users to drag and drop it onto a platform that supports advanced emergency alerting. 

Above all, Michaelsen said advanced emergency alerting must put viewers first, giving them the ability to limit alerts to those that are of interest.

“So many alerts come across the producer’s desk every day,” said Michaelsen, “but we want to back up because ultimately this is really about the user—the person sitting at home or the person using their mobile device.”

“We want to make sure that in a sense we are almost partnering with them and not necessarily disrupting their lives,” he said.

Sinclair has begun working with the designers of smart TVs to help them guide consumers through a menu of available warnings as they set up their NextGen TVs. Consumers not only will be able to select the types of alerts, such as tornado warning or flash flood warning, they wish to see but also the level of warnings they wish to see—warning versus watch, for instance. 

The support for location services in NextGen TV will also play an important part in preventing viewers from being bombarded with alerts. “Right now in most television environments, we send out a flood warning, and it doesn’t affect about 95% of the people that get it. It just irritates them,” he said.

For public broadcasters without newsrooms, Michaelsen said there will be opportunities to partner with news-producing broadcasters that support advanced alerting. “These [advanced alerts] would all be pre-programmed so it doesn’t even require anyone to be at your station. It will just pass through,” he said.

RALEIGH, N.C.—WRAL-TV is the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. NBC affiliate owned and operated by Capitol Broadcasting. Our station is known for having achieved a number of technological firsts over the years, including our 2016 launch of an ATSC 3.0 TV station with the first live simulcast of a commercially licensed TV station.

Capitol Broadcasting is a member of ATSC, and we play an active role in the ATSC Technology Group 3 (TG3) responsible for developing the ATSC 3.0 broadcast TV standard.

We’re also part of the Advanced Emergency Alerting (AEA) Implementation Team focused on supporting integration of rich-media alerting into ATSC 3.0. One of our many valuable partners is this work has been Digital Alert Systems (DAS).

MORE THAN JUST AN EAS ENCODER

Digital Alert Systems’ DASDEC Emergency Alert System platform has been the mainstay of our EAS presence for more than a decade, and today it supports all of our call letter stations (WRAL, WRAZ, and WILM) by processing EAS/CAP messages for a total of nine streams leaving our building. Through continual upgrades, our DASDEC platform has evolved into more than just an EAS encoder-decoder; today it also serves as a content management server and middleware for AEA applications.

Enabled by ATSC 3.0, AEA capabilities on the DASDEC platform support delivery of rich media such as live video updates, video clips, escape route maps, images or diagrams, and location-based information. (ATSC 3.0 also enables geo-targeted public alerts and messages to first responders.) Though our EAS capabilities have grown far more robust, none of the existing EAS messaging will go away. We’ll still put banners on screen and play those familiar attention tones, but we have many more options in providing emergency information.

In fact, we’re also working with DAS and other partners within the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance to optimize—in a more social sense—the touch, look, and feel of rich media alerts to smartphones, tablets, and fixed television receivers. AWARN members are focusing on the advantages of ATSC 3.0’s higher data throughput, more robust transmission, and improved indoor reception not only to deliver rich media, but also to wake up devices and to deliver alerts even when the cellular network is jammed or the power grid is down.

The broadcast television infrastructure in the U.S. is very robust. We’re prepared to stay on air through natural disasters. We’re not reliant on the internet, but we can leverage connectivity as available to offer the public another level of support, be it additional information or a link by which people can report power outages and so forth. ATSC 3.0 opens the door to a lot of exciting new possibilities, and our DASDEC system gives us the tools we need to realize the next-gen standard’s potential with respect to EAS.

The industry intelligence of the DAS team is evident not only in their contributions to TG3, the AEA Implementation Team, and the AWARN Alliance, but also in the valuable capabilities added to the DASDEC platform over time. Our EAS system has grown increasingly sophisticated through regular software updates—our DASDEC box just keeps on running smoothly through every update.

EAS is near and dear to our hearts at Capitol Broadcasting, and we’re proud to be working with Digital Alert Systems and other industry leaders to bring advanced alerting into the EAS landscape.

Pete Sockett currently serves as Capitol Broadcasting Director of Engineering and Operations at WRALTV in Raleigh-Durham. He can be reached atPSockett@wral.com.

For more information, visitdigitalalertsystems.comor call 585-765-1155.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.

WASHINGTON — A new report from a working group of the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) lays out a new vision for alerting the public in times of emergency and explores how the new ATSC 3.0 television standard can play a major role.

“The ATSC 3.0 (AKA Next Gen TV) standard holds the potential to not only vastly improve the broadcast television viewing experience and expand programming opportunities, but also enhance emergency communications capabilities and create new operational capabilities for broadcast stations,” it says.

The report, “Comprehensive Re-imagining of Emergency Alerting,” identifies three ways the Next Gen TV standard supports distribution of emergency information, including EAS support, advanced emergency services, such as Advanced Emergency Alerting (AEA), and CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) relay via 3.0’s native IP transport capability.

[Read: Public TV Raises Concern Over Possible WEA Enhancement]

The standard’s support for advanced emergency information services offers “a powerful tool” to target any type of emergency information beyond typical emergency alerts to TV viewers. “This is an informational service capable of conveying a broad range of urgent information bulletins and updates to targeted audiences,” the report says.

When it comes to Advanced Emergency Alerting, 3.0 offers broadcasters a way to reach fixed, mobile and portable consumer devices with audience-targeted messages, alerts flexible enough for nearly any form of emergency information, location-targeted alerts, support for multimedia content such as graphics, photos, maps and video, alert updates, multilingual messaging and a wake-up signal to awaken receivers in standby or sleep mode, it says.

The report notes that 3.0 deployment is voluntary and that the working group expects EAS “to continue to provide its essential functions for national and local public alert and warning.” It envisions 3.0-based alerting as “a value-added function from television broadcasters.”

Among the other topics covered in the document is the role PBS and local public television stations play in helping to protect communities by datacasting to deliver information to individuals and first responders.

The report lays out the main features of PBS-WARN, which takes advantage of the nationwide public TV interconnection system to provide for a nationwide emergency alerting network that serves as a redundant backup path for the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) C interface, which is technologically diverse from the Commercial Mobile Service Provider’s primary WEA gateway.

The document describes various instances of public broadcasters partnering with first responders in different locales to enable responders to send information and video via datacasts in emergency situations. Instances noted in the report include OEAS Public Alertnet with ties to all eight Ohio public TV licenses and their 12 stations, as well as other examples in Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada and Texas.

The working group’s report notes public TV stations choosing to deploy Next Gen TV will be able to provide even more robust emergency alert and communications service to first responders and the public. For example, 3.0 will allow them to operate more efficiently in terms of TV bandwidth usage, which could allow additional Common Alert Protocol feeds of national, regional and statewide data pertaining to alerts.

“Because PBS has already implemented an intersection of traditional broadcast and cellular technologies through the nationwide PBS-WARN system, we believe that public media has shown itself [to] be an ideal vehicle for projects which explore alerting and the intersection of the next generations of traditional broadcast (ATSC 3.0) and Cellular Mobile Service (5G),” says the report.

America’s Public Television Stations (APTS) issued a statement July 19 lauding the report. “The extraordinary technological achievement of ATSC 3 will enhance public safety communications and interoperability capabilities for law enforcement. Public television is already experimenting with the new services this broadcast standard makes possible,” says Patrick Butler, APTS president and CEO.

The report is available on the FCC website.

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