LYNDONVILLE, N.Y.—Digital Alert Systems is reporting that its DASDEC Emergency Alert System (EAS) platform supports the new password requirements recently adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), enabling users to comply with the new rules through capabilities that are built into the system.

The announcement follows the Federal Communications Commission’s adoption of FCC 26-38, which establishes new cybersecurity requirements for Emergency Alert System (EAS) participants, including a requirement that passwords be at least 15 characters long. All current versions of DASDEC software already support passwords up to 16 characters, enabling users to meet the new requirement immediately without installing software updates or waiting for new password-management features.

FCC 26-38, the Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking establishing the new cybersecurity password requirements, requires EAS participants to comply within 60 days after publication in the Federal Register. While the publication date has not yet been announced, DASDEC customers are already equipped to meet the new password requirement using capabilities built into current versions of the platform.

“Cybersecurity has been a core design principle for DASDEC for many years, not merely a response to changing regulations,” said a spokesperson for Digital Alert Systems. “The FCC’s new password requirement aligns with established security best practices that our customers have already been able to implement. Our goal has always been to provide broadcasters, cable operators and other EAS participants with practical security tools that help protect these critical public safety systems.”

Beyond password length, DASDEC incorporates multiple layers of security designed to strengthen access control. The platform requires users to replace the factory-default password upon first sign-in, blocks common and prohibited passwords, prevents password reuse and warns administrators when passwords are more than 180 days old. DASDEC also locks accounts after multiple unsuccessful login attempts, helping slow automated brute-force attacks.

For organizations managing multiple facilities or EAS devices, DASDEC supports enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations. SSO enables administrators to manage user authentication centrally, assign role-based permissions, monitor access and quickly revoke credentials across connected systems when personnel changes occur. By reducing the need to maintain separate passwords for individual devices, SSO also encourages the use of stronger, more complex credentials throughout the organization.

More information is available on the company’s website.

WASHINGTON—Representatives of the AWARN Alliance recently met with Federal Communications Commission officials to stress the fact that NextGen TV devices are designed to receive Emergency Alerts and to rebut findings of a study by Weigel Broadcasting that claimed to have found problems with the ability of ATSC 3.0 devices to receive crucial emergency alerts.

The July 13 meeting, which was summarized in a July 15 letter to the FCC, involved Dave Arland and Kathryn Barnhart of the AWARN Alliance, Media Media Bureau staff (Hillary DeNigro, Lyle Elder, Mark Colombo, Maria Mullarkey, and Evan Baranoff), Allison Howell and Patrick Harty (legal advisor and staff for Commissioner Brendan Carr) and Marcus Maher (legal advisor for Commissioner Olivia Trusty.)

During the meeting the AWARN representatives stressed that their “mission is to save lives and protect communities by leveraging advanced emergency alerting, news, and information powered by the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard” and that they were meeting with the FCC “to clear up a misrepresentation made about the ability of ATSC 3.0 receivers to properly receive and display Emergency Alert System (EAS) messaging.”

AWARN also stressed that “the voluntary Advanced Emergency Information (AEI) capability of the ATSC 3.0 standard is a useful and effective supplement to the EAS already in place, which reaches millions of viewers with broadcast signals. As the AWARN Alliance has previously stated, we reiterated that local stations are the best option for keeping local audiences informed during specific emergencies, including providing geolocation targeted information, maps, multilingual and sign language services, and other capabilities that are anticipated in the ATSC 3.0 standard.”

In addition, AWARN argued that “more than 18.5 million NextGen TV sets and converter boxes can receive EAS Alerts…[C]ontrary to the impression delivered by Weigel Broadcasting during their recent meeting and subsequent ex parte filing , virtually every ATSC 3.0 receiver can easily tune to ATSC 3.0 broadcasts with an antenna and without an internet connection.”

They also rebutted Weigel’s contention that “an internet connection is a requirement for ATSC 3.0 reception…this is not a factual statement. We noted that EAS signaling is present in the actual linear broadcast, and that supplemental data can be delivered through optional AEI capabilities of the standard, which could rely on both broadcast and internet-delivered information. But if a viewer is simply watching a linear program, we stated that viewer will get EAS alerts.”

AWARN also complained that “receivers `tested’ by Weigel were “cherry-picked” to emphasize their point” and that they focused on just two products.

Although AWARN did not mention this, one of those products, HDHomeRun has since upgraded its boxes so they can receive alerts without an internet connection.

“Unmentioned in the selected Weigel reception results is the fact that internet service is not required for ATSC 3.0 reception with the least expensive NextGen TV receivers now available to consumers, including set-top receivers manufactured by ADTH and Zinwell…Further, we pointed out that the submitted analysis only considered advanced “gateway” set-top devices with retail prices that exceed $200, designed for consumers who have broadband connections and who also desire advanced program guides and multi-room viewing capability.”

AWARN also noted that the Zapperbox device that Weigel “tested” is the only device on the market that requires an internet connection to decrypt content, and a Zapperbox software update to change this behavior is already in the works.”

The full discussion is available here.

Sage Alerting has issued a technical note regarding Emergency Alert System passwords.

In response to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent rule change, it sent an email to users of the Sage Digital ENDEC model 3644. It applies only to users in the United States.

“Important: If you are changing your ENDEC’s password to meet the new FCC requirements, do not use the ampersand (&) or plus (+) character in your new password,” it states.

The FCC will now require that stations and other EAS participants use a strong password with at least 15 characters. It said to avoid common words or using the same password for other purposes.

Security updates must be installed promptly, and stations must use firewalls or other network segmentation.

“While these rules take effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, these are commonly accepted cybersecurity rules,” Sage wrote. “There is no reason to wait.”

The company said it plans a free software update this year that fixes bugs and will permit the use of & and + in the password.

“You do not need to wait for that update to implement the new password requirements if you avoid those characters.”

The complete report and order is here. And Sage has posted specific guidance for its users here.

This article was intially published by our sister publication Radio World.

WASHINGTON—Digital Alert Systems, a major supplier of Emergency Alert System and common alerting protocol equipment and solutions, has filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission rebutting some of the assertions Weigel Broadcasting has made regarding NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 and the standard's limitations in delivering emergency alerts.

In a recent filing with the FCC. Weigel released a study contending that the transition to 3.0 broadcasts would cause problems with the public’s ability to receive vital emergency alerts.

Weigel has been a consistent opponent of proposals by the NAB and broadcasters to speed up the transition to ATSC 3.0 and set a firm cutoff date for ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.

In a June 3 meeting with FCC officials, Weigel reiterated its opposition to a mandatory cutoff for ATSC 1.0 broadcasts by arguing that: “(1) ATSC 3.0 makes a free service expensive and simple service complicated; (2) broadcasters may elect to degrade (or not improve) broadcasting in favor of non-broadcast services, such as gambling, pay television services, and private data delivery services; and (3) consumers, primarily those in rural areas underserved in terms of content and connectivity, may be the most harmed by a transition to ATSC 3.0.”

During that meeting, Weigel also “discussed Internet connectivity requirements to receive ATSC 3.0 DRM-encrypted channels” and shared its testing of “low-cost’ converter devices across four television markets. Weigel observed that when these devices weren’t connected to the Internet, EAS messages were not delivered. “In ATSC 1.0, there are no Internet connectivity requirements for EAS,” the broadcaster noted.

That study was strongly criticized by the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority (A3SA) in a June 26 letter that stressed “A3SA-suppported devices are designed to be fully compatible with the Commission’s Emergency Alert System (EAS) and to ensure that emergency alerts are reliably delivered to viewers. That is how the A3SA content protection framework was designed, and that is how it operates across the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem.”

In its FCC filing, Digital Alert Systems took no position DRM issues and praised Weigel for raising “an important and legitimate concern in that viewers must be able to receive essential emergency information over the air, including when broadband service is unavailable, unreliable, unaffordable, or disrupted by the very emergency for which public warning is needed.”

But the July 2 letter stressed that “the issues identified [by Weigel]...appear to relate more to the particular device configurations and options in those two particular products, rather than issues with ATSC 3.0, DRM, or broadcast technologies.”

The letter also attempted to “clarify the technical record insofar that a specific observed converter-device behavior is not read more broadly than the available evidence supports. The referenced ex parte presentation appears to document a particular result involving two converter devices, certain DRM-protected services, and certain offline test conditions. That result does not, by itself, establish that ATSC 3.0 inherently requires Internet connectivity for emergency alerting, that content protection necessarily interferes with EAS, or that a mandatory 19.3 Mbps `Broadcast PLP’ is the technical answer to the behavior described.”

Additional details can be found in the original filing, which is available here.

WASHINGTON—ATSC 3.0 Security Authority, LLC is once again defending the digital rights management features and the Emergency Alert System capabilities of NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 with a sharp rebuttal of arguments made by Weigel Broadcasting to the Federal Communications Commission.

In a June 26 letter to the FCC, the A3SA stressed that “A3SA-suppported devices are designed to be fully compatible with the Commission’s Emergency Alert System (EAS) and to ensure that emergency alerts are reliably delivered to viewers. That is how the A3SA content protection framework was designed, and that is how it operates across the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem.”

While recent filings by Weigel Broadcasting Co. suggested that issues identified with the delivery of EAS alerts are somehow indicative of fundamental incompatibilities between ATSC 3.0 and EAS, the A3SA stressed that “this is simply not true. All broadcasters, and A3SA, share Weigel’s commitment to ensuring that EAS messages are reliably delivered to all viewers.2 Weigel’s filing, however, fundamentally mischaracterizes the source of the identified EAS issues, since those failures stem directly from implementation choices made by specific manufacturers – and have nothing to do with ATSC 3.0 or its key aspects including digital rights management (`DRM’) and other content protection features.”

The letter stressed that DRM systems in nearly all ATSC 3.0 capable devices are working as designed. “Every ATSC 3.0 television being manufactured today supports DRM and the millions of televisions and other devices operating today demonstrate that DRM does not impede, limit, or affect the reception of EAS messages,” the letter noted.

The problems, the group added, stem simply from two tested devices. “Weigel’s test results reflect the implementation decisions of the two particular manufacturers who produced the devices that were tested,” the group said. “They do not establish that DRM, content protection, or any other ATSC 3.0 features interfere with EAS delivery.”

In the case of the other box, “the BitRouter ZapperBox issue identified by Weigel is a device-configuration matter, not indicative of a DRM or ATSC 3.0 problem,” the group said. “ZapperBox is an outlier among A3SA-enabled set-top devices because, in its current implementation, it requires an initial Internet connection to obtain an over-the-top (`OTT') license needed to process encrypted content on a channel. That choice reflects ZapperBox’s connected-device use case: it is a higher-end set-top product, with DVR capabilities, intended for consumers who typically use it in an Internet-connected environment, where it operates as intended. However, the Internet connection is not a permanent requirement. Once the OTT license is obtained, the license persists and continues to function without an Internet connection. The box can then be disconnected from the Internet and will continue to operate, including decrypting video and audio and displaying EAS messages embedded in the broadcast stream. Weigel’s presentation again takes a connected-use device at a specific pre-license stage, removes the connectivity needed for that initial license acquisition, and then treats the result as evidence of a DRM problem. That characterization is false.”

The letter also complained that “Weigel’s presentation creates the false impression that Internet connectivity is a systemic requirement for ATSC 3.0 content protection. The opposite is true. A3SA specifically designed and engineered its content protection solution for OTA broadcast transmissions without ever needing an Internet connection. All devices that support the A3SA framework are provisioned with factory installed licenses which facilitates the “never-connected” to the Internet mode of operation. There are millions of devices sold into the ATSC 3.0 ecosystem – including all set-top boxes from manufacturers that support the A3SA content protection framework such as ZapperBox, Zinwell, ADTH, Shift2Stream, and GT Media, as well as every ATSC 3.0 television being manufactured today – operate with the same capability with factory installed licenses and the vast majority of those devices operate today without ever requiring an Internet connection.”

“As A3SA stated in its February 18, 2026 Reply Comments in this proceeding – and as Weigel’s own presentation acknowledges – more than 18 million devices can access all NextGen TV content, including EAS, whether encrypted or not, without needing an Internet connection or subscription,” the letter concluded. “Blaming ATSC 3.0 content protection for a device-specific implementation failure is akin to blaming a television broadcast station because its HDTV signal cannot be received on an SD-only television. The broadcaster’s signal is working; the standard is working; the missing capability is in the receiver. So too here: the issue is not ATSC 3.0 or the content protection framework, but the design choices made by particular device manufacturers.”

The full letter can be read here.

Weigel’s filing can be found here and the NAB’s comments on this issue are available here.

WASHINGTON—In a 3-0 vote by Commissioners, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted new rules for the Emergency Alerting System (EAS) that aim to preserve the public’s trust in EAS by targeted cybersecurity upgrades to prevent cybercriminals and foreign governments from hijacking the system.

“Requiring stronger password practices, timely software updates and improved security controls will help reduce opportunities for bad actors to exploit weaknesses in alerting equipment,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said.

In addition, the Commission will move forward with a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks comment on additional ways to modernize EAS and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) ranging from bolstering reliability to improving geographic accuracy, the agency reported during its June Open Meeting on June 25.

A notable feature of those proposals in the June 25 Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is a proposal to allow the implementation of EAS capabilities via software instead of hardware and retiring the 90-character maximum versions of WEA messages.

During the meeting the Commission adopted three specific measures to help protect against hijacking by cybercriminals and our nation’s adversaries. Those require EAS Participants to use strong passwords, promptly test and install security patches issued by equipment manufacturers, and use a network firewall or comparable practice to better limit access to their equipment.

In addition, the regulator issued a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proposing multiple targeted improvements that can make EAS and WEA more accurate, resilient, flexible, and useful. These proposals would improve EAS’s integrity by requiring the authentication of all alerts before they are transmitted and promote the reliability of emergency alerts by establishing a universal alert identification number to help block duplicate alerts.

The Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking also explores improving geographic accuracy by eliminating outdated WEA geotargeting exceptions that often cause alerts to be received in the wrong locations and increasing alert effectiveness by requiring EAS and WEA to display symbols that match the type of emergency.

Finally, the FCC is proposing to remove outdated requirements by allowing the implementation of EAS capabilities via software instead of hardware and retiring the 90-character maximum versions of WEA messages.

In a statement, NAB president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt praised "Chairman Carr’s leadership in strengthening and modernizing the Emergency Alert System. We are pleased with the Commission’s newly adopted Report and Order, which establishes reasonable safeguards to enhance the cybersecurity of EAS. Local radio and television stations play a vital role in delivering trusted emergency information to communities when it matters most. Ensuring that EAS remains secure, reliable and effective is essential to that mission."

LeGeyt also said that the NAB supports "the Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and appreciate the Commission’s approval of NAB’s petition to consider software-based EAS alert processing as an alternative to dedicated physical hardware. By allowing broadcasters to deploy security updates more quickly, reduce equipment downtime and strengthen system redundancy, this proposal can help ensure stations are better positioned to deliver critical emergency information when communities need it most."

More information is available here.

A more detailed description of the changes can be found at our sister publication Radio World.

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.

WASHINGTON—Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has released a tentative agenda for the June Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, June 25, 2026 that should include votes on emergency alerting, the E-Rate program, 911 reliability, submarine cables and other issues.

The FCC described the items up for consideration as follows:

• Cutting Red Tape and Accelerate the Buildout of Wireline Infrastructure. The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose and seek comment on standards for when state and local statutes, regulations, and legal requirements have a prohibitive effect on the provision of wireline telecommunications services in violation of Section 253 of the Communications Act, particularly through the imposition of excessive delays and fees that impede infrastructure deployments and disincentivize investments in new infrastructure. (WC Docket No. 25-253).
• Reviewing E-Rate Program and Student Screen Time. The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks comment on measures the Commission can take to better protect children when using E-Rate-funded networks, the Commission’s progress in ensuring affordable access to high-speed broadband to and within schools and libraries, and whether the Commission’s current interpretation of the Children’s Internet Protection Act is the best reading of the statute, and a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes actions to strengthen E-Rate program integrity and streamline program administration. (WC Docket Nos. 26-133; 13-184; 21-93; 21-455).
• Improving Next Generation 911 Reliability and Interoperability. The Commission will consider a Second Report and Order and Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to improve reliability and interoperability in the nation’s Next Generation 911 (NG911) transition. The item would modernize and streamline 911 reliability rules for IP-based networks, promote interstate interoperability of NG911 systems, and eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens. (PS Docket Nos. 21-479, 13-75).
• Modernizing of the Nation’s Alerting Systems. The Commission will consider a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that take steps to modernize the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). The Report and Order aims to preserve the public’s trust in EAS by requiring targeted cybersecurity improvements to protect the system from cybercriminals and our nation’s adversaries. The Further Notice would propose additional ways to modernize EAS and WEA to make them more helpful to alerting authorities, less burdensome for participating communications providers, and better able to save lives. (PS Docket Nos. 25-224, 22-329, 15-91, 15-94).
• Accelerating the Buildout of Submarine Cables. The Commission will consider a Second Report and Order and Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would accelerate buildout of secure submarine cable infrastructure, while strengthening national security. (OI 24-523, MD 24-524).

The FCC publicly releases the draft text of each item expected to be considered at the next Open Commission Meeting. One-page cover sheets are included in the public drafts to help summarize each item. All these materials will be available on the FCC’s Open Meeting page: www.fcc.gov/openmeeting.

The Open Meeting is scheduled to commence at 10:30 a.m. ET in the Commission Meeting Room of the Federal Communications Commission, 45 L Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. It will also be streamed live on the agency's YouTube channel.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission has announced that it will vote on a proposed Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that takes steps to improve the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) by requiring targeted cybersecurity improvements to protect the system from cybercriminals and our nation’s adversaries.

The Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which has not been adopted or implemented by the agency, also proposes additional ways to improve EAS and WEA to make them more helpful to alerting authorities, less burdensome for participating communications providers, and better able to save lives.

As part of those improvements, the FCC said it will consider whether it should eliminate what the agency calls “outdated and unnecessary alerting requirements by proposing to allow the implementation of EAS capabilities via software instead of hardware and retire the 90-character-maximum versions of WEA messages.”

In the past, the NAB has pressed the FCC to allow software implementations.

Last year, the NAB is requested the Federal Communications Commission make changes to Emergency Alert System (EAS) rules that would allow but not require EAS participants to use software-based EAS encoder/decoder technology instead of a legacy physical hardware device to process EAS messages.

In that April 2025 filing, the NAB urged the FCC fast-track the request because hardware supplier Sage Alerting Systems, one of two hardware suppliers, has recently stopped production of devices and because the “the current legacy ecosystem is not sustainable.”

In 2025, the FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that launched a reexamination of the nation’s alerting systems to explore ways to make them more effective, efficient, and better able to serve the public’s needs.

The proposed Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FNPRM) is the result of that inquiry. It aims to preserve the public’s trust in EAS by requiring targeted cybersecurity improvements that will help protect against hijacking by cybercriminals and foreign governments.

More specifically, the FCC described the changes as follows:

• Improve EAS’s integrity by proposing to require the authentication of all alerts before they are transmitted.
• Bolster the reliability of emergency alerts by proposing to establish a universal alert identification number to improve the detection and blocking of duplicate alerts and ensure that WEAs are consistently sent to members of the public who newly enter an alert’s delivery area until the emergency ends.
• Improve geographic accuracy by proposing to eliminate outdated WEA geotargeting exceptions that often cause alerts to be received in the wrong locations and expand geotargeting options for EAS.
• Make alerts more effective by seeking comment on requiring EAS and WEA to display symbols that match the type of emergency and improving the ability of earthquake alerts to grab the public’s attention.
• Remove outdated and unnecessary alerting requirements by proposing to allow the implementation of EAS capabilities via software instead of hardware and retire the 90-character-maximum versions of WEA messages.

The proposed Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released on June 4 2026 is not a final, adopted action. It has been circulated for tentative consideration by the Commission at its Open Meeting on June 25. The issues referenced and the Commission's ultimate resolution of those issues are subject to change, the agency stressed.

The full document is available here.

WASHINGTON—Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has announced a tentative agenda for the May Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, May 20, 2026.

The item with the most direct potential impact on broadcasters is a Report and Order that aims to modernize the disaster information reporting system.

The FCC described the items as follows:

• Modernizing the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) – The Commission will consider a Third Report and Order to modernize DIRS by enhancing its capabilities while eliminating unnecessary reporting burdens. These actions will provide better information to emergency managers during disasters and allow communications service providers to focus their resources on service restoration instead of redundant paperwork at times when every second counts. (PS Docket Nos. 21-346, 15-80; ET Docket No. 04-35)
• Enhancing Know-Your-Upstream-Provider Requirements – The Commission will consider a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose to enhance the STIR/SHAKEN framework used by voice providers to combat illegal robocalls by improving know-your-upstream-provider (KYUP) requirements and oversight, raising standards for STIR/SHAKEN attestations, and closing implementation loopholes. (WC Docket No. 17-97; CG Docket No. 17-59)
• Streamlining Broadband Data Processes and Reducing Unnecessary Regulatory Burdens –The Commission will consider a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would take several steps to streamline and improve the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection (BDC). This item would alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens on service providers and challenge process participants by streamlining audits and verifications, improving challenge processes, and reducing regulatory burdens that add costs without a corresponding benefit to the quality of provider-reported data, all while ensuring that the data depicted on the National Broadband Map is accurate. (WC Docket Nos. 11-10, 19-195; GN Docket No. 25-133)
• Launching ‘High-Cost’ Program Initiative – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking comment on how a High-Cost Modernization initiative could best ensure that all Americans, particularly those in rural areas, have access to next-generation services in an ever-changing environment. (WC Docket Nos. 26-96, 10-90)

Documents and materials relating to each of the items are available here.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission has voted unanimously to adopt a proposal to amend the Audible Crawl Rule that would ensure that people who are blind or visually impaired continue to have access to the same critical details of an emergency as sighted viewers.

The agency made the move after repeated delays over an 11-year period in implementing the so-called Audible Crawl rule because the regulator and broadcasters had found no workable solution for implementing it.

The Commission’s Audible Crawl Rule requires the use of a secondary audio stream to convey televised emergency information aurally when such information is conveyed visually (e.g., in an on-screen text crawl or a small image, like a weather radar map), so that it is accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired.

The rule was adopted on April 8, 2013, with an original effective date of May 26, 2015, but has been waived and delayed “to the present day because a technical solution for automated descriptions of the information in such graphics does not exist,” the National Association of Broadcasters said in a Nov. 15, 2024, filing.

In early April, the Media Bureau issued a Memorandum and Order once again delaying the implementation of the so-called “Audible Crawl Rule” until 2027. That was the sixth time implementation of the rule has been delayed.

Currently, no technical solution exists for compliance with the audible crawl rule, as it relates to graphics such as a weather radar map.

This modified rule will stipulate that the rule is met if video programming providers or distributors provide textual crawls that convey emergency information duplicative of or equivalent to the visual, non-textual emergency information, as long as the text is conveyed aurally.

The April 30 Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking will start a rulemaking proceeding to seek comment on amending the Audible Crawl Rule. Importantly, the proposed rule change would ensure that TV broadcasters continue to provide radar maps and other graphics conveying emergency information during non-newscast programming, while also preserving accessibility and consumer interests.

WASHINGTON—Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr announced a tentative agenda for the April Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, April 30, 2026 that closely follows his recent blog post outlining major issues the agency is addressing in April.

The FCC described the items on the agenda as follows:

• Modernizing Spectrum Sharing for Satellite Broadband. The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would promote efficient spectrum sharing between geostationary and non-geostationary satellite systems. To take account of today’s satellite technology and operations and to promote expanded services to American consumers, the item would update the decades-old framework for how non-geostationary and geostationary satellite systems share spectrum. (SB Docket No. 25-157)
• Combatting Robocalls Through Enhanced Know-Your-Customer Requirements. The Commission will consider a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to enhance existing “Know-Your-Customer” (KYC) requirements by seeking comment on the information that originating providers must obtain from customers before they make calls, how providers should verify that information, and proposing to better set penalties for violations of these requirements proportionate to harm. This would fill gaps between general KYC requirements and the types of rigorous steps necessary to protect consumers from illegal calls. (CG Docket No. 17-59, 02-278)
• Ensuring Integrity and Security in Electronic Device Testing. The Commission will consider a Second Report and Order, Order on Reconsideration, and Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at strengthening national security and reciprocity through the equipment authorization program. The item would incentivize U.S. and allied testing and certification by creating a fast‑track review process for applications tested in Trusted Test Labs, direct updates to post‑market surveillance procedures, bolster enforcement tools, and establish confidential channels for industry to report potential violations or national security concerns. (ET Docket No. 24-136)
• Protecting Against National Security Threats in Domestic Telecommunications Service. The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would continue its efforts to protect the nation’s telecommunications networks by proposing to exclude entities identified on the “Covered List” from providing domestic interstate telecommunications services pursuant to blanket authority under section 214 of the Communications Act, and seek comment on other potential exclusions from blanket authority under section 214 and other related measures. (WC Docket No. 26-82)
• Establishing a New E-Rate Competitive Bidding Portal. The Commission will consider a Report and Order and Order on Reconsideration that would strengthen the integrity of the E-Rate program by establishing a competitive bidding portal and adopt several proposals aimed at streamlining and simplifying E-Rate program procedures. The portal would be used by applicants and service providers during the procurement process beginning in funding year 2028. (WC Docket No. 21-455; CC Docket No. 02-6)
• Amending the Audible Crawl Rule. The Commission will consider a Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to amend the Audible Crawl Rule and eliminate a technically unworkable provision while ensuring that people who are visually impaired continue receiving the critical emergency information they need. (MB Docket No. 12-107)

A list of materials providing more information on each of the items is available here.

WASHINGTON—Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr has highlighted a series of items that the regulator is likely to consider at its Open Meeting on April 30.

Those items include changes to the so-called “Audible Crawl.” Earlier this month the agency once again agreed to delay enforcement of that rule until November of 2027. It was the sixth time the implementation of the rule has been delayed since it was adopted in 2013.

The rule applies to “video programming distributors and video programming providers,” including TV stations, who must “provide an aural representation of visual, non-textual emergency information that is displayed during non-newscast programming, such as radar maps or other graphics, on a secondary audio stream” for persons who are blind or visually impaired.

“During the more than ten years that the successive waivers have been in place, the record indicates that there has been little progress in developing a workable technical compliance solution, and there is no indication of imminent progress,” the agency said in April 8 decision to delay implementation once again.

Carr provided few details on the items that will be considered at the April 20 meeting. Typically the agency posts supporting materials on its website closer to the meeting.

In a blog post he noted, “we’re enhancing accessibility by proposing to amend the Audible Crawl Rule, to eliminate an unworkable provision while ensuring that people who are visually impaired continue receiving the critical emergency information they need. This action keeps that information available in an accessible audio format while long‑term, modernized solutions are developed.”

In the blog, Carr also said that “we will be taking a major step by enhancing the satellite broadband experience for millions of Americans. Specifically, the Commission will vote on an order to modernize our satellite spectrum-sharing rules—a change that could unlock more than $2 billion in economic benefits for the American people and up to seven-fold capacity for satellite Internet services.”

The FCC will also be beefing up its fight against illegal robocalls.

“The Commission will vote on a proposal to strengthen our “Know‑Your‑Customer” rules for originating providers, closing gaps that have allowed too many illegal calls to enter the network,” Carr wrote.

Another major issue on the agenda is enhancing national security in the telecommunications landscape.

“We’re advancing a proposal to promote reciprocity in the Equipment Authorization program. The proposal will require that all test labs and certification bodies—the entities that review electronic devices for use in our country—be based in the U.S. or foreign countries with reciprocal trade agreements with America,” he wrote. “The proposal also seeks comment on phasing out the use of test labs and bodies based in countries without reciprocity agreements. The Commission will concurrently adopt an order to strengthen the integrity and security of our equipment authorization program through a range of measures building on the Commission’s `Bad Labs’ work.”

In another national security related item, Carr said “the Commission will consider a proposal to exclude entities identified on the national security `Covered List’ from blanket authority to provide domestic interstate telecommunications services under section 214. This proposal also seek comment on a range of other actions the Commission could take to end the “End Run” around our Covered List rules.”

In terms of universal service rules, Carr said they would be “enhancing the integrity of the E-Rate program by voting on an order to establish a new competitive bidding portal and document repository. This action brings greater transparency and consistency to the bidding process, helping ensure schools and libraries receive the most cost‑effective services.”

LYNDONVILLE, N.Y.—Digital Alert Systems has introduced the DAS3-DC-PS, a new DC power supply option for its DASDEC-III emergency alert system. Designed to meet the growing demand for DC-powered infrastructure, the DAS3-DC-PS supports a -36V to -72V input range, making it ideal for standard -48VDC facilities, the company said.

The DAS3-DC-PS marks an industry first, making Digital Alert Systems the only modern EAS equipment manufacturer to offer both AC and DC-powered product versions, according to DAS. By eliminating the need for multiple AC-to-DC converters, the new option reduces heat generation, improves operational efficiency, and simplifies backup power integration using direct battery banks.

“The introduction of the DAS3-DC-PS reflects our commitment to evolving with our customers’ needs,” said Jon Rue, vice president of technology at Digital Alert Systems. “As more facilities transition to DC power architectures, we’re proud to offer a solution that not only simplifies integration but also enhances safety and reliability. This option opens the door for broader deployment of DASDEC-III systems in telecom and broadcast environments where efficiency and uptime are critical.”

Replacing the standard AC power supply, the DAS3-DC-PS connects via a two-lug terminal strip and offers a safer, more efficient alternative for facilities that have adopted DC powering schemes. Operating at 48V DC—below the 50V threshold recognized by safety regulations—the DAS3-DC-PS reduces the risk of electric shock and allows for the use of lower-voltage cabling, simplifying installation and maintenance.

DAS says the new DC option also brings significant facility-level benefits. The negative polarity of -48V DC helps prevent corrosion of copper cables and battery terminals, while its compatibility with telecom standards ensures seamless integration with other equipment. Facilities can use standard 12V lead-acid batteries wired in series to create a 48V backup power source, enabling uninterrupted operation during power failures without the need for inverters or AC-to-DC conversion.

Priced at $450, the DAS3-DC-PS can be factory-fitted into new DASDEC-III units or retrofitted by returning existing units to the factory.

More information about Digital Alert Systems is available at www.digitalalertsystems.com.

The Consumer Technology Association told the Federal Communications Commission last week that it believes the current Emergency Alert System is highly effective and, if expanded, could create more problems than it solves.

The association’s comments were in response to an NPRM issued by the commission last month in which it said it would explore whether fundamental changes to the Emergency Alert System—which provides emergency alerts to the public via radio, television, satellite and cable systems, and Wireless Emergency Alerts—which provide emergency alerts to supported mobile devices—would make them more effective, efficient, and better able to serve the public’s needs

The CTA told the commission that while it appreciated its efforts towards reassessing the state of emergency alerting in the U.S., adding more regulations to current rules would be expensive and time-consuming.

“Expanding EAS and WEA beyond the media and devices they reach now would require overcoming resource-intensive and complicated technical hurdles, while duplicating the alerting that the public already receives,” the CTA said in its filing. “Because the public safety community has expressed concern with alert fatigue, avoiding unintended consequences also requires the careful evaluation of any new requirements and guidelines.”

With nearly all Americans (98% as of 2024) owning a cellphone, CTA said the current system works well.

“The integration of wireless phones into consumers’ lives means that the shift in behavior from traditional television and radio to online media and connected devices does not frustrate the alerting ‘systems’ objectives of widespread public notification about emergencies,” the association told the FCC.

The CTA added that “most Americans receive emergency and public safety information through WEA to mobile devices, not terrestrial radio or broadcast television.”

When a combined WEA-EAS test was conducted in October 2023, the association conducted a survey to determine how Americans received the emergency alerts, and found that approximately 245 million U.S. adults (95%) received or heard the emergency alert via their phone. Specifically, 92% of U.S. adults (approximately 237 million) indicated they received the alert through their smartphone.

“The results of this survey illustrate the ubiquity of cellphones and smartphones and the effectiveness of the WEA system in reaching device users,” the CTA said.

Even when watching TV or listening to the radio, consumers usually have their mobile devices close by, CTA added.

“Consistent with CTA’s 2023 nationwide test survey findings, other data also indicate that most people watch television while engaging with a second screen such as a phone or tablet,” CTA said. “Thus, even if a person streams television content or other forms of entertainment not capable of receiving EAS, WEA could still successfully notify the individual of an emergency using a nearby cellphone or cellular-connected/paired wearable.”

Although the CTA all but dismissed broadcast alerts as obsolete, it did admit that because the current EAS model is built on broadcast-based architecture, adding new rules would cause technical barriers because most OTT services stream content on-demand and not live.

“Over-the-top (OTT) streaming and other internet services are different in fundamental ways from broadcast technologies, creating challenges to the technical feasibility of using such services to transmit EAS alerts," CTA said. "Many OTT services cannot broadcast real-time content, limiting their ability to transmit real-time alerts, or only allowing them to do so on a limited basis.

“These OTT services are more accurately described as on-demand file services with content on the edge of networks or in content delivery networks,” the CTA added. “Such services are not designed to broadcast real-time or near-real-time content like EAS alerts,“ the consumer electronics trade group continued. “Effectively transmitting internet alerts would also require gathering, analyzing, targeting and parsing location information beyond the current EAS capabilities. Many streaming services and internet-connected devices do not have or are not designed to transmit content based on location in the way that EAS alerts require. EAS participants and relay stations directly transmit to a specific geographic area based on the location of the participants and relevant stations, such as the relevant state or locality. Many internet-connected devices, in contrast, do not readily identify their location beyond country or world region.”

The fragmented nature of viewing SVOD services on multiple devices is another technical hurdle, CTA said.

“Multiple users on the same account in more than one location can often use a streaming service simultaneously, complicating the targeting of local and state alerts,” the association said. “Using a service in multiple, disparate locations presents a challenge to the precise location targeting of the vast majority of alerts, such as during hurricanes and other weather events.”

Unlike broadcast, which uses standards such as ATSC 1.0 or 3.0 that ensure compatibility, streaming devices do not, CTA said, adding another technical burden.

“Ensuring interoperability among the different streaming technologies and EAS is another obstacle to technical feasibility,” CTA said. “Streaming companies do not have a 'core technology' to use to transmit EAS alerts, unlike traditional ATSC 1.0 broadcasting or the Advanced Emergency Alert in ATSC 3.0. The large variety of internet-capable end-user devices provides an additional challenge for ensuring compatibility with a uniform format for EAS transmissions.”

The association suggested that the FCC may have bitten off more than it could chew in the current notice of proposed rulemaking.

“Given the high-level nature of the inquiries in the NPRM, CTA anticipates that a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking would be appropriate to allow industry and other stakeholders to evaluate and comment on any specific new requirements and identify implementation challenges,” the association said. “If the Commission develops new proposals, CTA urges the Commission to refrain from proposing any user interface or equipment mandates, which risk both exceeding the FCC’s legal authority and stifling innovation by locking in regulator-dictated design choices. In addition, any new rules should provide a sufficient implementation period, as well as provide for waivers, including class waivers, where appropriate.”

WASHINGTON—In response to an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to “modernize” existing systems for alerting people during emergencies, the NAB has laid out a number of proposals for improving the systems while preserving the important role that radio and TV broadcasters play in the current system.

“NAB supports the FCC’s further consideration of ways to enhance EAS, while preserving and promoting the legacy EAS system as a critically important redundant failsafe backup,” the filing said. “Broadcasters take pride in their unique role in EAS, and look forward to partnering with the FCC, FEMA, and other stakeholders on future enhancements that would increase public safety."

As part of its proposals for improving the system the NAB’s filing proposed the following measures and laid out its position on these issues:

• The FCC should consider ways to enhance the effectiveness of alert originators. As part of that the NAB said it supports more AO funding, training, and collaboration.
• Government agencies should maintain exclusive authority to issue eas alerts.
• The FCC should preserve the existing presentation of EAS alerts while considering voluntary options for enhanced video-rich alerts.
• EAS participation should remain mandatory only for presidential alerts.
• Redundancy is the most effective way to ensure resilience.
• In addition, the NAB said it supports improving the geotargeting of EAS alerts and would support efforts to enhance the security of EAS.
• The NAB also supports consideration of approaches to expanding EAS to additional media platforms.

The NAB's defense of the role played by broadcasters is important because the FCC’s original Notice of Proposed for updating alerting systems said that the agency would examine a wide variety of issues and attempt to completely reexamine existing approaches.

Those issues included, the FCC said in the NPR, an examination of whether broadcasting should continue to play a central role in any new system given the ongoing shift from traditional radio and TV to streaming and mobile devices.

“EAS, for instance, was originally designed to continue operating when traditional communication methods are not functioning and alerts can only be delivered via independently powered broadcast facilities,” the NPR noted. “Does this approach to EAS resiliency remain necessary today? Are there other alternative communications pathways that EAS and WEA can leverage to ensure redundancy? Should EAS and WEA both be independently resilient (i.e., having multiple redundant pathways within EAS, as well as within WEA) or is it sufficient for EAS to provide a redundant source of alerts to WEA and vice versa? Could existing public alert and warning infrastructure be made more resilient by increasing the interoperability of EAS and WEA (e.g., by enabling mobile devices capable of receiving a WEA to receive EAS alerts when cellular infrastructure is damaged)?”

A separate filing by the Consumer Electronics Association more directly raised the issue of the importance of broadcasters in alerting systems.

It noted that “the nation’s alerting system is successfully and reliably reaching Americans as they incorporate more and more wireless devices into their everyday lives. The integration of wireless phones into consumers’ lives means that the shift in behavior from traditional television and radio to online media and connected devices does not frustrate the alerting “systems’ objectives of widespread public notification about emergencies.”

“CTA’s data demonstrates that most Americans receive emergency and public safety information through WEA to mobile devices, not terrestrial radio or broadcast television,” the CTA also noted. “In 2023, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and FCC conducted a nationwide EAS and WEA test with the goal of ensuring that the system continues to be a successful means of communicating emergency information to the public…In the days immediately following this test, CTA Market Research conducted a survey to understand the method for how U.S. adults received/heard the emergency alert on October 4, 2023. The survey indicates that approximately 245 million U.S. adults (95%) received/heard the October 4 emergency alert via their phone. Specifically, 92% of U.S. adults (approximately 237 million) indicated they received the alert through their smartphone. The results of this survey illustrate the ubiquity of cellphones and smartphones and the effectiveness of the WEA system in reaching device users.”

The original NPR also makes no mention of public media, which has traditionally played an important role in alerting or ATSC 3.0, which has a number of features for advance alerts. In a separate filing ATSC laid out its position on how NextGen TV could help in the design of a new system.

In its filing, the NAB said “Broadcasters applauded the FCC for launching this proceeding. Of the many ways that television and radio broadcasters serve the public interest, none is more important than the critical role we play in protecting the safety of our viewers and listeners. The architecture of the broadcasting system is particularly resilient and enables local stations to reliably distribute emergency warnings and information to virtually all Americans. Recent events such as Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the Texas Hill Country floods, and the Los Angeles wildfires all underscore the importance of broadcasters during a disaster, as well as Congress’s decision to formally designate broadcasters as `first informers’ in 2018. Broadcasters lead the way in ensuring the integrity of EAS through routine testing and investing in new and upgraded EAS equipment, including updates mandated by regulation. And while broadcasters are proud to champion EAS, NAB respectfully reminds the Commission as it considers the ideas raised in the Notice that participation in EAS is essentially an unfunded government mandate.”

WASHINGTON—In response to effort by the Federal Communications Commission to modernize the country’s alerting systems, the ATSC, the broadcast standards association has submitted comments to the FCC saying that “the ATSC 3.0 next-generation broadcast standards developed by ATSC, is designed to provide accessible, multi-lingual, rich-media, geo-targeted emergency messaging over the air…[with features that offer]...”substantial benefits to public safety and emergency communication.”

The ATSC submitted the comments in response to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the FCC’s PS Docket No. 25-224 concerning the potential improvements to the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA).

The filing signed by ATSC president Madeleine Noland, stressed that while the standards group “does not advocate for regulatory change” it felt that “it is important to inform the Commission and the public about the technical capabilities of the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard—specifically, its optional Advanced Emergency Information (AEI) features—that align with and could complement many of the use cases discussed in the NPRM. These optional technical features also may provide examples of how such functions could be supported in other settings.”

The filing explains that ATSC 3.0’s AEI service "represents a valuable, voluntary innovation that can enrich public warning with media-rich content, multilingual resources, and accessibility features. Because AEI is an optional element within a voluntary standard, it should be recognized as a supplemental enhancement—not a substitute—for core alerting mechanisms such as EAS (and, where appropriate, WEA). Properly framed, AEI can complement these systems by expanding the ways in which the public receives and engages with emergency information, while preserving the primacy and reliability of the nation’s baseline alerting infrastructure.”

The filing also stressed that its AEI capabilities were designed with input from emergency management professionals. Those capabilities include:

• Text, audio, and video alerts, including sign language video and multi-lingual support.
• Location-targeted messaging to specific geographic areas down to the broadcast cell level and further filtered for location at the device level using multiple shapes such as polygons, circles, and postal code identifiers.
• Iterative “update” and “cancel” message types, making it suitable for fast-moving or evolving emergencies.
• Content to fixed and mobile devices, public signage and more, even in the absence of internet or cellular connectivity.
• Broadcaster applications that enable customization based on user preferences such as language preference, alert type, severity level, dismiss/redisplay message, and geographic area of interest to help reduce alert fatigue.
• Content scoped to a particular audience, such as the general public or first responders

The filing also stressed that "a number of impactful pilot projects in the United States have demonstrated the viability of AEI in real-world conditions, including delivery of tornado warnings with embedded video, wildfire evacuation notices with maps and visuals, and multilingual alerts in communities with diverse populations."

The full filing is available here.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has issued a reminder that Emergency Alert System (EAS) participants must submit their Form One identifying information into the EAS Test Reporting System (ETRS) no later than October 3, 2025.

Each year, the FCC requires EAS participants to provide information regarding their EAS equipment and monitoring assignments, facility location, contact information and other information.

EAS Participants required to file the form include analog radio and television stations, wired and wireless cable television systems, direct broadcast satellite, digital television broadcast stations, satellite digital audio radio service, digital cable and digital audio broadcasting systems, and wireline video systems.

The FCC reported that filers can access ETRS by visiting the ETRS page of the Commission’s website at https://www.fcc.gov/general/eas-test-reporting-system.

This also includes links to instructional videos regarding registration and completion of the ETRS Form One.

EAS Participants that have questions or need help with the filing process may contact Bureau staff for assistance by emailing ETRS@fcc.gov.

Filers may contact FCC Licensing Support for assistance with creating a Username or other CORES troubleshooting via the web at https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/available-support-services, or by telephone at 1-877-480-3201. The support hours of operation are 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday (except Federal holidays).

More information is available here and here.

Sage has released an update to its most recent firmware for its Digital ENDEC model 3644.

The issue only applies to its U.S. users.

In its Aug. 27 Rev96-1 firmware release, Sage found that character generators and LED signs may display alerts in the “severe” color, regardless of the type of alert.

The Sept. 3 Rev96-1-P1 firmware update corrects this error. It includes all of the updated benefits from the original release, which adds support to receive and relay Missing and Endangered Persons event codes.

Sage updated its download page to include the corrected version of the Rev96 release. It is safe for users who have already installed the first Rev96-1 version to install the update on top of it.

For users who downloaded the Rev96-1 release but have not installed it, Sage said to simply download and install the new, corrected version.

“All of the instructions and other information regarding Rev96-1 still apply,” Sage said.

Both the original update and the corrected version are free for users to install. The update itself is optional, but Sage recommends its installation.

Sage invites any questions from its users via email or call 914-872-4069 and press “1” for support.

[Related: “Sage Firmware Update Adds MEP Event Code”]

[Editors Note: This article originally appeared in our sister publication Radio World.]

WASHINGTON—Federal Communications Commission has set deadlines for comments on its efforts to modernize the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS).

In August, the FCC adopted a Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (Third Further Notice) that seeks comment on proposals that would ensure the system is collecting information useful to disaster response without imposing unreasonable burdens.

The Third Further Notice set deadlines for filing comments and reply comments at 30 and 60 days, respectively, after publication in the Federal Register. That means comments must be filed on or before October 2, 2025, and reply comments must be filed on or before November 3, 2025, the agency said.

As previously reported, the DIRS, which was launched in 2007, has collected information from communications providers, cable operators, phone companies, wireless firms and broadcasters on the impact of severe weather and other natural disasters on their operations. The information, which includes data on phone and broadband outages, collected through DIRS allows emergency management officials to more efficiently prioritize disaster response efforts.

Currently television and radio broadcast providers, broadband Internet access service (BIAS) providers, satellite providers, and other communications service providers may report voluntarily in DIRS when it is active, but are not required to do so. The previous administration had tried to make reporting mandatory for broadcasters..

That effort was opposed by the NAB. In 2024, the FCC did, however, make reporting mandatory for wireless, wireline, cable and VoIP providers. .

In launching the new effort to reexamine the system, the FCC said the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is designed to begin a thorough review of DIRS to modernize the system for reporting and to develop changes to current rules that might reduce the reporting burdens providers during disasters, while increasing the utility of the reports, the FCC said.

This includes simplifying reporting requirements, limiting DIRS reporting obligations to facilities-based providers, and promoting federal and state agencies’ ability to obtain direct access to NORS and DIRS filings by eliminating unnecessary access requirements, among other improvements for efficiency, the FCC said.

More details are available in the full NPRM here.

WASHINGTON—As expected, the Federal Communications Commission has embarked on a major effort to reexamine the national alert and warning systems, including the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr announced in July plans for a fundamental reexamination of existing alerting systems and the agency voted to officially go forward with the idea during its August Open Meeting.

The FCC said the action will explore whether fundamental changes to these systems, which include EAS, which provides emergency alerts to the public via radio, television, satellite and cable systems, and WEA, which provides emergency alerts to supported mobile devices. could make them more effective, efficient, and better able to serve the public’s needs.

More specifically, the notice of proposed rulemaking will:

• Seek comment on the objectives for effective alert and warning systems.
• Explore which entities need to be able to send alerts to fully accomplish these objectives and how these needs should be addressed in the design of alerting systems.
• Consider the alert transmission capabilities that a national public alert and warning system must have to achieve its objectives, including the need for resilience, geographic targeting, and security.
• Ask whether EAS and WEA are meeting the needs and expectations of both the public and alerting authorities, and if not, whether redesign or targeted changes would allow EAS and WEA to fully reach their potential.
• Examine both the types of information and distribution methods needed to effectively convey information to the public through EAS and WEA.

Notably the proposed NPRM does not mention the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the Trump administration is shutting down. In the past, the CPB has played a major role in channeling funding to public stations to implement and upgrade their alerting systems.

The proposed NPRM also makes no mention of ATSC 3.0 or the transition to NextGenTV/ATSC 3.0. Proponents of 3.0 broadcasts have repeatedly touted its capabilities for delivering much more robust and informative alerts.

In late July, TV Tech's Phil Kurz reported, “The Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance made the rounds at the Federal Communications Commission last week to underscore the importance of removing the ATSC 1.0-3.0 simulcast requirement, establishing a date certain for the shutoff of legacy DTV and setting a date by which broadcasters must transmit 3.0 to facilitate a successful transition and support continued technological innovation in broadcasting.”

"AWARN Alliance executive director Dave Arland and Ed Czarnecki, AWARN steering committee member and vice president of government and international affairs at Digital Alert Systems, met July 25 with FCC Media Bureau and Public Safety Bureau staff, as well as legal and policy advisers to Commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty, to discuss how realizing all of the benefits of advanced emergency warnings depends on shutting down ATSC 1.0 and fully transitioning to 3.0, along with other issues, according to notices of ex parte communication sent to the agency."

In a public statement on the NPRM, Carr said: “One of the points that I have emphasized with the FCC’s leadership team is that we should take a first principles approach to our jobs. Just because something has been done a certain way for a certain number of years, we should not hesitate to change things up—whether in big or small ways.

“That is certainly the approach we are taking with this item today,” he said “Two of our most vital communications tools to keep people safe in times of crisis are the nation’s alerting and warning systems: the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). I’ve seen these tools in action, and there is no doubt that they have had a tremendous impact on public safety and saving American lives. Since I’ve been at the Commission, we’ve made multiple changes to both programs. But the frameworks underlying EAS and WEA are 31 and 13 years old, respectively. That’s a long time by any measure, and a lifetime in the tech sector. Today, we are asking questions to assess whether EAS and WEA are delivering on their objectives, and if not, how they can be changed to make sure they are leveraging the latest technology to save lives.”

The full notice can be found here.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission has voted to launch a review of its system for collecting data on network outages and restoration during major disasters. The effort, the agency reported, will pave the way for reforms to the Commission’s Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) that are designed to make sure that its benefits outweigh its burdens.

Since its inception in 2007, DIRS has collected information from communications providers, cable operators, phone companies, wireless firms and broadcasters on the impact of severe weather and other natural disasters on their operations. The information, which includes data on phone and broadband outages, collected through DIRS allows emergency management officials to more efficiently prioritize disaster response efforts.

Currently television and radio broadcast providers, broadband Internet access service (BIAS) providers, satellite providers, and other communications service providers may report voluntarily in DIRS when it is active, but are not required to do so.

In launching the new effort to reexamine the system, the FCC also noted, however, that DIRS reports take time to produce, potentially drawing resources away from responding to an ongoing disaster.

To address that issue, the FCC said the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is designed to begin a thorough review of DIRS to modernize the system for reporting and to develop changes to current rules that might reduce the reporting burdens providers during disasters, while increasing the utility of the reports, the FCC said.

This includes simplifying reporting requirements, limiting DIRS reporting obligations to facilities-based providers, and promoting federal and state agencies’ ability to obtain direct access to NORS and DIRS filings by eliminating unnecessary access requirements, among other improvements for efficiency, the FCC said.

The Commission also adopted an accompanying Order on Reconsideration that clarifies the situations in which network outage reporting requirements are suspended during DIRS activations. It also maintains requirements to send outage notifications to 911 and 988 officials during DIRS activations to ensure these officials can receive timely information about outages and in turn enable the public to reach these critical services during a disaster.

More specifically, the FCC said that the NPRM proposes to:

• Provide manual filers a single streamlined, dynamic form for DIRS reporting that reduces burdens by being simpler to complete than the ten existing worksheets.
• Simplify DIRS reporting requirements by eliminating fields that do not offer significant value to public safety stakeholders, while offering limited additional voluntary fields that are tailored to the current information needs of emergency managers.
• Eliminate the requirement for mandatory DIRS filers to submit a final report after DIRS is deactivated to further reduce reporting burdens and enable providers to focus on disaster response and recovery.
• Limit DIRS reporting obligations to facilities-based providers, which will eliminate unnecessary reporting burdens for resellers and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs).
• Examine whether to suspend NORS filing obligations during DIRS Lite activations to reduce regulatory compliance obligation during disasters.
• Promote federal and state agencies’ ability to obtain direct access to NORS and DIRS filings by reducing access requirements.

The NPRM also described the data it would collect in a new streamlined report. For broadcasters the proposed fields for that report would include what the FCC called the following "voluntary information":

• Call Sign
• FAC ID
• Broadcast Status
• Power Status
• Impacted Equipment Location Information (Latitude/Longitude or Street Address/City/State/Zip)
• Generator Availability
• Fuel Status (Volume Capacity and Hours)

For cable communications providers "required information" in the proposed new form would include:

• Physical System Identifier (PSID)
• Type of Major Equipment Down
• Power Status
• Common Language Location Identifier (CLLI) Code for the Equipment
• Impacted Equipment Location Information (Latitude/Longitude or Street Address/City/State/Zip)
• Number of OC3s or Functional Equivalents Down
• For Filers Required to Report Broadband Status: Number of Broadband Access Subscribers Served: Estimated Number of Broadband Access Subscribers Down

"Voluntary information" from cable operators would include:

• Generator Availability
• For Filers Not Required to Report Broadband Status: Number of Broadband Access Subscribers Served; Estimated Number of Broadband Access Subscribers Down

More details are available in the full NPRM here.

WASHINGTON—Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr has announced a tentative agenda for the August Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, August 7, 2025.

As previously reported, that agenda will include a vote on an inquiry that will embark on a fundamental reexamination of America’s emergency alerting systems.

The FCC described the August agenda as follows:

• Revamping NEPA Review to Accelerate Infrastructure Deployment – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would examine the Commission’s environmental rules to ensure they comport with the amended National Environmental Policy Act, accelerate the federal permitting process, further a national priority of faster and more infrastructure deployment, and ensure that the Commission’s rules are clear. (WT Docket No. 25-217).
• Streamlining Space Bureau Reviews – The Commission will consider a Second Report and Order that advances opportunities for innovation in the space economy by taking measures to expedite the application processes for space stations and earth stations, to remove barriers for modifying authorizations, and to remove outdated rules. (IB Docket Nos. 22-411, 22-271).
• Accelerating Buildout of Secure Undersea Cable Infrastructure – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would modernize the Commission’s submarine cable rules to unleash high-speed infrastructure deployment, while strengthening our national security. The Commission will also consider a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would build upon the Report and Order by proposing measures to further streamline and improve timeliness of submarine cable application review and make other updates to address national security threats. (OI Docket No. 24-523, MD Docket No. 24-524).
• Evaluating the Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications – The Commission will consider a Notice of Inquiry that would initiate the annual assessment of whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, as required by section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. (GN Docket No. 25-223).
• Examining the Nation’s Alerting Systems – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would examine the national alert and warning systems from the ground up and explore ways to make them more effective, efficient, and better able to serve the public’s needs. (PS Docket No. 25-224).
• Modernizing the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to reduce the reporting burdens on communication service providers during disasters through the modernization of DIRS. The Commission will also consider an accompanying Order on Reconsideration that clarifies the situations in which outage reporting requirements are suspended during DIRS activations. (PS Docket Nos. 21-346, 15-80; ET Docket No. 04-35).
• Addressing Business Data Services Pricing Regulations – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose to end rate regulation and tariffing obligations for legacy circuit-based business data services provided by incumbent local exchange carriers, and an Order temporarily pausing the triennial update to the competitive market tests pending review of the record in this proceeding. (WC Docket Nos. 21-17, 17-144).
• Deleting 98 Obsolete Broadcast Rules and Requirements – The Commission will consider a Direct Final Rule that would repeal certain rules identified as outdated and obsolete via a direct final rule procedure. The Commission’s “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete” docket seeks public input on identifying FCC rules for the purpose of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens. (GN Docket No. 25-133).

Materials relating to each of these items can be found at www.fcc.gov/openmeeting.

The Open Meeting is scheduled to commence at 10:30 a.m. ET in the Commission Meeting Room of the Federal Communications Commission, 45 L Street, N.E., Washington, D.C.

Open Meetings are streamed live at www.fcc.gov/live.

WASHINGTON—Reps. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) and 24 other House members have signed on to a letter asking the Federal Communications Commission to include language-access experts in its upcoming Hurricane Season Resiliency Roundtable set for July 7.

The letter comes as the FCC is under mounting pressure to provide better emergency alerts in multiple languages. In 2023, the FCC voted to require wireless emergency alerts be sent in 13 languages as well as American Sign Language, but it has since been criticized for delaying implementation.

The most recent letter, signed July 6 by 27 members of Congress, urged FCC Chair Brendan Carr, a Republican, and Acting Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau Chief Zenji Nakazawa to prioritize multilingual, culturally competent emergency communications and to embed language accessibility into every phase of disaster preparedness and response.

“Nearly 68 million United States residents speak a language other than English at home, and over 25 million are classified as LEP,” the lawmakers wrote. “During hurricanes and other disasters, these individuals face significant, documented barriers to accessing emergency alerts, evacuation orders, and disaster recovery information in a language that they can understand.

“As the FCC convenes its Hurricane Season Resiliency Roundtable, it has an opportunity to address longstanding gaps in language accessibility during disasters,” the House members continued. “To improve access to lifesaving information and support economic resilience, the FCC should prioritize making public safety communications—including Wireless Emergency Alerts, Emergency Alert System messages broadcast over television and radio, and 911 accessibility standards—multilingual, culturally competent, and accessible to all.”

In response to the letter and the ongoing flooding emergency in Texas that has killed dozens of people, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, once again reiterated her support for rules requiring operators to send alerts in multiple languages.

Earlier, in late May, TV Tech reported that Barragán joined Gomez and Carson (Calif.) Mayor Lula Davis-Holmes to demand that Carr immediately publish the implementation requirements for the FCC’s multilingual Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) rule in the Federal Register—a necessary step to activate a life-saving policy unanimously approved by the agency in October 2023.

WASHINGTON—As the battle over funding for public media continues in Congress, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee has recommended level funding of $40 million for fiscal year 2026 for the Next Generation Warning System (NGWS).

The Trump administration has been trying to both eliminate future funding for public media and to claw back funding that was previously approved funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The NGWS money is intended to help public broadcasters beef up their emergency alerting capabilities. America’s Public Television Stations immediately applauded the Committee’s decision.

In a statement, Kate Riley, president and CEO of APTS said that the group is "grateful that the committee recognizes the essential role that public television plays in the nation’s civil defense, public safety and homeland security. The committee’s approval of continued funding of $40 million for the Next Generation Warning System will help ensure public broadcasters are able to continue to meet their public safety missions and provide the highest level of resilient and reliable public safety and homeland security services to communities throughout the country.”

“We look forward to working with the full House Congress to ensure that this critical funding moves forward through the appropriations process,” she added.

The group also stressed that public television’s digital infrastructure provides the backbone for emergency alert, public safety, first responder, and homeland security services in many states and communities, including many local stations that serve as their states’ primary Emergency Alert Service (EAS) hub for severe weather and AMBER alerts.

“In addition, public television is one of two technologically diverse pathways that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state and local public safety officials use to send Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages to cell phone subscribers,” Riley said. “The encrypted messages ride over the public television broadcast spectrum and infrastructure directly to cell phone providers who in turn send them to their subscribers. Sending these messages over the public broadcasting pathway ensures they can reach every corner of the country, even if internet service is compromised or unavailable. These geo-targeted messages can reach subscribers wherever they are in the event of an emergency.”

APTS also highlighted how they have been working with public safety officials around the country on a federal, state and local level.

“We have worked with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to demonstrate the effectiveness of these ground-breaking services in flood control and evacuation, rural school shooting scenarios, large crowd management, over-water emergency communications and other lifesaving applications where broadband or cellular service are not fully functional,” Riley said, adding that public stations had also partnered with California Office of Emergency Services to reduce the early earthquake warning standard from 30 seconds to less than 3 seconds.

In addition, public stations built a Statewide Emergency Communications Network with the State of Tennessee and public media stations in Florida created an emergency network that delivers up-to-the minute weather and news reports during severe weather events in Florida and South Carolina, APTS reported.

CARSON, Calif.—Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) joined Federal Communications Commission member Anna Gomez and Carson City Mayor Lula Davis-Holmes on Tuesday to demand that FCC Chair Brendan Carr immediately publish the implementation requirements for the agency’s multilingual Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) rule in the Federal Register—a necessary step to activate this life-saving policy unanimously approved by the agency in October 2023.

The delay has been blamed on a regulatory freeze imposed by President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order in March declaring English as the official language of the United States.

Gomez and Holmes said the delay in publishing these implementation requirements has stalled critical improvements to the WEA system that would make emergency alerts accessible in more than a dozen languages, including Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

“In emergencies, every second counts—and every word must be understood,” Barragán said. “We’ve seen what happens when communities don’t get accurate information in their language. It leads to panic, confusion and danger. Chairman Carr’s delay is not just bureaucratic, it’s reckless.”

The press conference comes after a false evacuation alert that was sent out to residents in Los Angeles County during the January wildfires, which caused widespread chaos when a technical glitch sent a county-wide warning intended for a single neighborhood. This was confusing for all 10 million L.A. County residents who received the alert, but especially for the 2.5 million residents who are classified as having limited English proficiency. When disaster struck, many non-English speakers were left unsure of what was happening, compounding confusion and fear.

“As we see an increase in natural disasters such as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, expanding access to life-saving information is becoming more and more important,” Gomez said. “We cannot play politics with public safety. It’s time for the FCC to allow this process to move forward so that more people can receive the critical information they need in their chosen language.”

Added Davis-Holmes: “When lives are on the line, there’s no excuse for delay. In a city as diverse as Carson, our residents need to receive nationwide emergency alerts in the language they understand. This is about equity, safety and respect. I join Congresswoman Barragán and Commissioner Gomez in calling on Chairman Carr to do what’s right—act now and publish the implementation requirements.”

Barragán, Gomez and Davis-Holmes urged Carr, a Republican, to publish the implementation requirements immediately to start the 30-month compliance clock, requiring mobile service providers to install alert templates on Americans’ phones that would automatically translate alerts into the devices’ default language.

The push has strong backing from the top Democrat on the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and the current and former Chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and Congressional Black Caucus, whose members represent communities most impacted by language-access failures.

The archived livestream of the event is here.

In a wide-ranging filing with the Federal Communications Commission, Digital Alert Systems has come out in favor of an NAB proposal to help speed-up the transition to NextGen TV and is backing a proposal to withdraw multilingual EAS using pre-translated templates.

The alerting system technology provider also reiterated its previously reported opposition to an NAB’s petition urging the agency to allow software-based EAS, saying it is premature, and submitted without substantive discussion with the EAS manufacturing community.

The filing, which was made in the FCC’s “In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete” docket, also asks the FCC to revisit how the Electronic Test Reporting System (ETRS) filings are done, and requests that those filings from radio and TV stations be reduced.

The “In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete” GN Docket 25-133 asks for public comment on FCC rules that should be deleted. It has emerged as one of the agency’s most popular dockets, with over 1,130 filings as of May 8.

The May 8 DAS filing strongly supports the NAB call to delete the simulcasting and "substantially similar" requirements that are holding back deployment and innovation on ATSC 3.0 Next Gen TV.

“We support NAB’s petition asking the FCC to facilitate a nationwide transition to ATSC 3.0,” the filing argued. “First, the FCC should delete, effective immediately, the “substantially similar” rule, which is currently scheduled to sunset in July 2027; and Second, the FCC should delete the rule requiring simulcasting of ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 in its entirety in February 2028, along with the beginning of the full two-phase transition to nationwide Next Gen TV broadcasting, to allow broadcasters to use spectrum as efficiently as possible.”

“While both rules were intended to ensure continuity and consumer protection during the early stages of Next Gen TV deployment, we believe they have now become obstacles to progress,” the filing argued. “Their continued enforcement undermines broadcasters’ ability to fully utilize ATSC 3.0 capabilities, most notably, the delivery of AEI services critical to public safety.”

More specifically, the filing noted that the rules are “artificially limit innovation in ATSC 3.0 by preventing broadcasters from offering enhanced content.” That enhanced content includes: interactive emergency alerts; localized and multilingual warning graphics; real-time shelter maps and evacuation instructions; supplemental information for people with disabilities (e.g., synchronized sign language, enhanced audio cues, screen reader compatibility).

However, DAS strongly opposed the NAB’s proposal that would allow broadcasters, on a voluntary basis, use a software-based alerting system. That NAB proposals was also supported by the Society of Broadcast Engineers.

“Digital Alert Systems (DAS) supports innovation within the Emergency Alert System (EAS), however we cannot support the NAB Petition for a rulemaking remove the requirement that EAS Participants must use an FCC-certified physical hardware device, and allow usage of software solutions for which there are neither FCC certification procedures, nor are there conformity testing processes via DHS FEMA,” the filing said. “The NAB proposal in its Petition is premature, underdeveloped, and raises profound regulatory, cybersecurity, operational, and public safety concerns that must be resolved before any rulemaking proceeds.”

In addition, the NAB petition would allow software-only EAS solutions without clear certification frameworks, which would remove FCC oversight currently provided by hardware certification, DAS argued. This raises a number of problems, including:

• Lack of a Certification Process: No plan is offered for verifying software compliance, raising serious concerns over version control, auditing, and enforcement.
• Oversight Erosion: The FCC would lose the ability to perform field inspections or monitor standard compliance if there is no physical device.
• Fragmentation Risk: Absence of a standardized certification path would result in a fragmented EAS environment, undermining reliability and interoperability.
• Regulatory Ambiguity: Dual regimes for software and hardware would create inequities and confusion for EAS Participants and manufacturers alike.

The full filing can be found here.

The cable industry has told the Federal Communications Commission it supports the National Association of Broadcasters’ proposal to allow broadcasters to use software-based Emergency Alert Systems.

At issue is a petition from the NAB (PS Docket Nos. 15-94 & 22-329), filed at the end of March, to fast-track its request to allow broadcasters to transition from hardware-based decoders to software for emergency alerting. The association is asking for urgent action in part because hardware supplier Sage Alerting Systems, one of two hardware suppliers, has recently stopped production of devices and “the current legacy ecosystem is not sustainable.”

Digital Alert Systems, the other provider of hardware-based EAS systems to broadcasters, recently told the FCC that it thought the proposal is premature and highlighted unresolved issues related to cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and operational challenges associated with software-only EAS platforms.

NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, the trade group representing major cable operators, said “commendable steps” have been taken in recent years to upgrade alerting systems, including the use of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), a technology that helps improve clarity and provide more detail about emergency alerts.

“NAB’s proposal to permit EAS Participants to elect software-based EAS solutions may present the Commission with another opportunity to ensure that emergency alerting keeps pace with modern technology,” NCTA said in its filing. “Although NAB’s proposal discusses the use of a software-based EAS encoder/decoder in the context of broadcast station operations, such a solution may be of use to cable EAS participants as well.

“NCTA agrees with NAB that any such solution should not be directly exposed to the internet or be fully cloud-based," the association added. "This approach would be consistent with other software-based aspects of broadcast and cable network operations. NCTA also agrees that consideration of this issue is made more necessary by Sage Alerting Systems’ decision to cease production of its encoder/decoder device.”

NAB’s proposal has drawn support from SBE.

WASHINGTON—The Society of Broadcast Engineers has filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission that support a proposal by the National Association of Broadcasters to allow software-based alerting technologies in a filing with the FCC.

As previously reported the NAB is requesting the Federal Communications Commission make changes to Emergency Alert System (EAS) rules that would allow but not require EAS participants to use software-based EAS encoder/decoder technology instead of a legacy physical hardware device to process EAS messages.

The NAB is urging that the FCC fast-track the request because hardware supplier Sage Alerting Systems, one of two hardware suppliers, has recently stopped production of devices and “the current legacy ecosystem is not sustainable,” the NAB argued in its March 31 filing.

In response, the SBE argued: “Permitting broadcasters to use flexible software-based EAS equipment would open up another potential area of EAS development, both for broadcasters and equipment manufacturers. This could help fill the hole created by the aforementioned manufacturer’s discontinuation of EAS hardware offerings. And, perhaps just as importantly, opening up the viability of flexible software-based EAS solutions could prevent a similar situation from arising in the future by providing more diverse EAS equipment development and deployment solutions such that the exit of a single manufacturer from the marketplace would not risk disabling the EAS infrastructure of so many of the key distribution points in the daisy chain.”

In a separate May 2 filing, Digital Alert Systems, a major supplier of EAS equipment, expressed reservations about the NAB proposal and urged the commission to delay action or reject the proposal.

“While the goal of modernizing alerting infrastructure is a valid and worthwhile objective, we are concerned that this petition fails to take into account a substantial array of unresolved regulatory, procedural, cybersecurity, operational, and intellectual property questions,” DAS argued. “These issues go well beyond implementation detail; they are foundational questions that will materially affect the safety and manageability of any software-based EAS platform.”

The SBE filing stressed, “Allowing EAS Participants to evolve to flexible software-based reception and distribution is not merely change for change’s sake—such evolution is vital to ensuring the continued viability of the EAS. In particular, near the end of 2024 one of the two primary EAS hardware manufacturers announced that they were ceasing production of their physical EAS endec … This, in turn, raises meaningful concerns for the EAS system as a whole.”

“Moreover, even if the foregoing immediate concerns were not present, permitting broadcasters to voluntarily utilize flexible software-based EAS solutions would still bring meaningful alerting and regulatory benefits,” the SBE concluded. “Among other things, SBE agrees with NAB that a flexible software-based approach could meaningfully alleviate delays and other difficulties many broadcasters currently face when dealing with EAS equipment maintenance and repair.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has lifted its “hold” on grant money for some public broadcast stations to upgrade their infrastructure.

According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, FEMA “lifted a 65-day hold on $38 million in contract reimbursements to CPB for public media stations seeking to update their equipment to create a more resilient and secure public alerting system.”

The news comes a little more than a week after two U.S. senators — one from each major political party — urged FEMA to release the grant money.

CPB in March brought a complaint in federal district court against FEMA over access to the money. It said that FEMA, without explanation, had placed a purported “hold” on the funds despite the intentions of Congress and its own prior commitments.

Among other goals, the grant program is intended to help TV stations upgrade to ATSC 3.0; enable radio stations to upgrade to digital capabilities to enable the broadcast of IPAWS alerts; help stations alert individuals with disabilities or limited English; and improve warning coverage in remote rural areas.

According to a timeline from CPB, in 2022 Congress directed FEMA to set up the grant program, and CPB over three years CPB has been awarded $136 million to administer it for FEMA.

To date about $24.9 million has been awarded to 45 organizations in 24 states from the initial round of funding, which drew from $40 million allocated by Congress for FY22. Congress also appropriated $56 million for FY23 and $40 million for FY24.

New grants

In the latest round, CPB has issued five grants totaling $9.65 million to statewide public broadcasting networks in Louisiana, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming, and to a radio station in Colorado:

• South Dakota Public Broadcasting receives up to $3.4 million to buy 12 alert encoders/decoders, upgrade 10 FM stations so the statewide radio network can transmit in HD Radio, and install equipment providing backup redundancy for the radio network in case of an emergency;
• Wyoming PBS receives up to $2.3 million to replace outdated equipment at 39 of its 53 locations to ensure timely emergency alerting;
• Louisiana Public Broadcasting Network receives up to $2 million for transmitters and antennas for TV stations in Lake Charles and Monroe and to update alerting equipment to enable statewide delivery of alerts;
• Wisconsin Network (PBS Wisconsin/Wisconsin Public Radio) has up to $1.4 million for decoders and other equipment to make Wisconsin Network more resilient, expand coverage in rural areas and upgrade emergency alerting; and
• KUTE Inc. KSUT Tribal Radio receives up to to $537,000 to replace equipment at nine locations to create back-up systems to broadcast emergency information during extended power outages.

This article originally appeared in our sister publication Radio World. [Visit Radio World’s News and Business Page here]

WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters has filed a massive document with the Federal Communications Commission detailing rules that it would like the agency to delete or revise, with the complete abolition of national and local broadcast ownership rules topping its wish-list.

Earlier this year, the FCC has opened a docket called “Delete, Delete, Delete” seeking comments on rules that need to be eliminated as part of a larger deregulatory push. The action has prompted a massive response from industry organizations, non-profits and individuals, with over 880 comments filed by 3 pm on Monday April 14. It is currently the most active FCC docket on the agency’s site.

In the filing the NAB continued its full court press for eliminating national and local broadcast ownership rules. It repeated many familiar arguments against the rules, asserting that the antiquated limits no longer reflect the realities of the media landscape and make it impossible for broadcasters to effectively compete against more lightly regulated tech, social media and streaming companies.

It also reiterated arguments previously made by the NAB to sunset ATSC 1.0 broadcasts and reduce or modify regulations that might slow the transition to NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0.

Last week the FCC opened a separate docket seeing comments on the NAB’s NextGen TV filing that will examine its proposals and others.

“If there was ever a proceeding tailor-made for broadcasters, this is it,” the NAB wrote. “Due to history – broadcast stations were the first regulated entities placed under the FCC’s purview – and a general lack of will, to date, the Commission has consistently failed to modernize, let alone delete, delete, delete, the myriad antiquated and ineffective rules that apply only to the nation’s free, over-the-air broadcasters. Simply because the Commission has jurisdiction over many aspects of broadcasting but not over the nation’s Big Tech and streaming giants, the Commission has traditionally donned blinders and addressed nearly every purported communications-related public concern by regulating broadcasters alone. This is a major policy failure that NAB has long urged the FCC to correct."

“But now, with Delete, Delete, Delete, the Commission has an historic opportunity to correct course, bring rationality to its regulatory regime, and make television and radio broadcasting stronger and more competitive with unregulated national and global companies that gobble up content and advertising dollars, while ignoring the needs of local communities,” the filing said. “To be successful in this critical endeavor, however, the FCC’s first step must be eliminating the national TV ownership rule and local TV rules and adopting NAB’s comprehensive proposal for local radio ownership modernization.”

Other major requests included:

• The commission should eliminate or at the very least minimize reporting obligations that impose extraordinary paperwork burdens on broadcasters while generating little-to-no benefit to the public. As part of that FCC should minimize the burden of the online public file and public file requirements; eliminate the FCC’s expanded foreign sponsorship identification rules; eliminate the eliminate the biennial ownership report requirement; drop antiquated requirements that compel broadcasters to announce renewals or transfers of broadcast licenses
• The NAB also argued that the EEO rule is ripe for reexamination and should be substantially “cut back.” In addition, it argued that the FCC should eliminate the EEO audit process, eliminate Form 395-B filing requirements and eliminate other EEO compliance burdens.
• The filing argued that the FCC to eliminate outdated Children’s programming rules, which the NAB argued are unconstitutional and unnecessary given changes in the marketplace.
• Following up on another recent NAB filing, the group also urged the FCC to permit software-based EAS operations. As part of its EAS requests, the NAB also urged the FCC to terminate consideration of certain unnecessary EAS proposals and said the rule governing “False EAS Alerts is “overly broad and ambiguous."
• The filing also addressed what the NAB called “certain unnecessarily burdensome accessibility requirements." The NAB requested that its proposal to update the Audible Crawl Rule should be promptly granted by the FCC. It also argued that the requirement to publish a station employee’s contact information to receive closed captioning complaints is unnecessarily burdensome.
• In addition, the NAB argued that FCC should eliminate rules that are duplicative of other laws or otherwise are obsolete. Those include eliminating the contest rule, which the NAB said is duplicative of other laws that protect the public from deceptive contests and the FCC should eliminate technical definitions that no longer are used or relied upon in the rule.

The NAB also urged the FCC to get rid of its “News Distortion Policy” which the agency has recently been using to hold up the Paramount/Skydance merger and to investigate TV stations accused of “news distortion” relating to their coverage of Donald Trump during the campaign. The parent companies of those stations were subsequently sued by Donald Trump.

“As NAB recently explained in another proceeding, the news distortion policy does not pass legal and constitutional muster for several reasons,” the filing stated. “First, the policy is not based on any explicit statutory mandate and therefore it is questionable whether the FCC has authority to enforce it. Second, the policy is contrary to the public interest and the First Amendment. The news distortion policy impermissibly chills speech and discourages coverage of important public issues. It also places the Commission into the intrusive and constitutionally suspect role of scrutinizing program content and the editorial choices of broadcasters.”

More on those "news distortion" investigations by the FCC can be found here, here and here.

The full NAB filing can be found here.

WASHINGTON—The NAB is requesting the Federal Communications Commission make changes to Emergency Alert System (EAS) rules that would allow but not require EAS participants to use software-based EAS encoder/decoder (endec) technology instead of a legacy physical hardware device to process EAS messages.

The NAB is urging that the FCC fast-track the request because hardware supplier Sage Alerting Systems, one of two hardware suppliers, has recently stopped production of devices and “the current legacy ecosystem is not sustainable.”

The NAB first proposed the software-based EAS option in December of 2022. Since then, it said it has developed proposals for the system based on advice of chief technology officers and senior engineers from many of the nation’s leading radio and television groups, as well as small and medium-sized broadcast companies, and noncommercial broadcasters.

The NAB also noted that they have put forward this request in multiple meetings with Commission staff, including one which took place at the headquarters of station WTOP-FM where they demonstrated how a software-based EAS solution could be efficiently integrated into a station’s facilities without affecting EAS performance.

In addition to support from numerous broadcasters for the change, the NAB said that the Federal Emergency Management Office (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert and Warning Systems (IPAWS) office has offered a clear endorsement and encouraged NAB to make the FCC aware of its view.

“Given that our proposal has been pending now for over two years, NAB respectfully requests expedited consideration of this Petition,” the March 31, 2025 letter to the FCC said. “Underscoring the urgency of this request is the recent decision of Sage Alerting Systems, one of the two remaining EAS device vendors, to cease production of its endec device due in large part to supply-chain problems acquiring legacy parts for original EAS hardware-only designs. With Sage’s exit, many EAS Participants, especially radio stations, will face significant challenges when they need to replace or upgrade an EAS device. Sage’s exit is a clear indicator that the current legacy ecosystem is not sustainable and that the Commission needs to permit more modern approaches to support a long-term, robust emergency alerting system.”

The NAB argued that software could work on multiple existing hardware systems and that software systems could be easily integrated into existing systems. "However, time is of the essence because legacy EAS devices have a certain shelf-life, and the FCC has several pending rulemakings that could demand device replacements or upgrades that Sage may no longer be able to provide,” the letter noted.

The NAB also argued that “allowing the use of a software-based EAS solution would free EAS Participants from the constraints of a required hardware device. Doing so would not only preserve the existing functionality of EAS, but improve the system’s effectiveness.”

The full text of the letter, along with the NAB’s approach to a new software based system can be found here.

LYNDONVILLE, N.Y.—Nebraska Public Media is deploying the Digital Alert Systems DASDEC Emergency Alert System (EAS) messaging platform at all of its radio and TV stations as part of its implementation of an IP infrastructure to prepare for transitioning to ATSC 3.0.

The public broadcaster is installing about 20 DASDEC units for redundancy and to support regional emergency messaging around Nebraska.

“We’ve been redesigning our signal distribution out to all our sites, and part of that redesign was to move to an IP workflow. We’ve also got ATSC 3 on our horizon. We knew our old equipment wasn’t up to the task,” said Al Krause, network operations manager at Nebraska Public Media.

“Not only are we futureproofing our system by going with all DASDECs into the future, but we’re gaining function and efficiency that we never would have had with our old gear," he added. "The plan going forward is to do more regionalization, which will enhance the precision and relevance of emergency communications across our 500-mile-wide state. I think that’s going to be easier to do with the DASDEC if for no other reason than the IP connectivity.”

The DASDEC platform gives Nebraska Public Media more flexibility in sending alerts and targeting specific regions. In the past, Nebraska Public Media could only trigger events across the entire state. Now, it can send statewide messages as well as use DASDEC units at specific radio transmitter sites to regionalize emergency alerts.

Beyond regionalization, the DASDEC system makes it possible for Nebraska Public Media to add a satellite-redundant mode for Emergency Action Notification (EAN) coverage if the IP network —the broadcaster’s primary method of alert delivery— fails.

In this scenario, the DASDEC units serve as backups for delivering critical emergency alerts. DASDEC devices installed at each FM site can receive alerts via SiriusXM, a secondary source of presidential alerts and EAN messages independent of the IP network. Linking SiriusXM with the DASDEC devices ensures continued primary alert delivery, thereby eliminating the IP network as a single point of failure, Digital Alert Systems said.

The DASDEC platform is easier to program, offers a test mode to ensure settings perform as intended and includes internal tuners, modern audio connections, programmable GPIO and a streamlined user interface—all improvements over its previous system, the company said.

“I have to sing the praises of DASDEC because it’s so much more efficient and flexible. My favorite thing is the alert node simulator. I can check to make sure that the filters are set correctly and that it’s going to fire off the right message at the right time. There’s also the programmable GPIOs. Unlike our previous system, which was pretty much just open/close, with the DASDEC you can program those GPIOs to do so many different things,” said Phil Gebers, broadcast engineer at Nebraska Public Media.

“I've also really liked working with the internal tuners. The less external gear you have to buy the better, and with the DASDEC we get three tuners built right into the box. Just plug in an antenna, set the frequency and off you go. I love that so much. No extra power supplies, no extra rack space and no extra cabling.”

Nebraska Public Media has also purchased a Digital Alert Systems HALO enterprise-level EAS device management system, which it will implement after the DASDEC rollout is completed.

More information is available on the company’s website.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission is proposing a fine of $369,190 against Corridor Television L.L.P., owner of KCWX in Fredericksburg, Texas, for “willfully and repeatedly violating” FCC rules regarding emergency alerts.

“Specifically, we find that Corridor failed to participate as required in three Nationwide Tests of the EAS … one time each year·in 2018, 2019 and 2021,” the FCC reported in a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture released Jan. 8. “We also find that Corridor failed to file 2018 EAS Test Reporting System (ETRS) Form Three” and “we find that Corridor submitted incorrect or misleading information, without a reasonable basis for believing such information to be correct and not misleading, in five ETRS filings subsequent to each Nationwide Test of the EAS in 2018, 2019 and 2021.”

Corridor, which owns the license for KCWX, is wholly owned by Global Information Technologies., a privately held, Texas-based company owned by Saleem and Carmen Tawil.

The owners have 30 days to pay the fines or to file papers asking the levies be reduced or eliminated.

The full Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture can be found here.

Emergency management officials in Florida are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to better protect residents from the threat of hurricanes and other natural disasters.

The new project involves technology from Futuri, a company familiar to radio broadcasters for its artficial intelligence-based services.

Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, the University of Florida and Futuri jointly announced the launch of what they called the first AI-driven emergency broadcast system to deliver disaster communications.

They say the Broadcast Emergency Alerts and Communications Operations Network, or BEACON, combines the benefits of AI with the resiliency of broadcast technology to allow emergency managers and first responders to communicate with communities.

Former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate endorsed the service and said this could be a model for a national system. Futuri, after testing its reliability in Florida markets this coming year, expects to offer the emergency system to other states.

Multilingual
The system automatically captures, prioritizes and translates public safety information from authorized sources, localizing the content based on geography and using AI to voice radio broadcast updates and advisories. It can also translate them into multiple languages (something the Federal Communications Commission has been eyeing for Emergency Alert System messaging).

“This critical information from state and local emergency managers is broadcast over traditional radio and TV airwaves and is also available via streaming and the free BEACON mobile app on iOS and Android. The system integrates directly into newsrooms and studios through a secure dashboard, allowing broadcasters across the state to access real-time content,” Futuri explained in its announcement. The tool includes radio and TV feeds that broadcast preparedness information even when there are no active disasters.

BEACON is set to roll out on 12 radio stations owned by the state university system of Florida. However, the system can be used by any commercial station in the state.

Daniel Anstandig, CEO and founder of Futuri, said work on the project began when state emergency management officials and the university identified a gap in the timely delivery of critical messaging. Futuri has a research and development partnership with the university’s College of Journalism and Communication, exploring new broadcast infrastructure technologies. (As we reported last year, the university was an early user of RadioGPT, the AI-based Futuri tool later renamed AudioAI.)

Angstandig noted that weather-based disasters are significant in Florida. “We set out to find ways to improve emergency communications infrastructure. Traditional emergency communication methods just often fail to reach enough people, especially during an evolving emergency. EAS has traditionally been an in-the-moment notification tool. BEACON was developed to provide communication before, during and after an emergency.”

Futuri is offering the online dashboard to every broadcaster in the state. The tool monitors activity from the State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. “It’s a secure encrypted website that broadcasters can log into to follow exactly what is happening statewide, which then can be prioritized for a local area,” he said. Radio and TV stations in Florida that choose to use the dashboard will be able to access the content and play specific multilingual alerts as they see fit. Broadcasters will not incur a cost to use the system.

The Statewide EOC/Warning Point emergency operations center will use it to add content as they deem necessary, Anstandig said.

“BEACON then uses AI to prioritize messaging, who needs to receive it and in what language,” Anstandig said. “This all happens in real time through the portal. It gets information from the same system that drives content to EAS and WEA [Wireless Emergency Alerts], but it is not at all related to those systems.”

But BEACON is integrated with IPAWS, the Integrated Public Alerts and Warning System, so alerts in IPAWS messaging are captured in BEACON without a manual process, the developers said.

Feeds will be available for every major metropolitan area in the state via the mobile app. Florida residents were encouraged to download the app. Citizens in the Gainesville area can also tune in to a local HD4 signal there for live BEACON broadcasts.

Anstandig said several of the 12 university stations inquired about carrying the content feed 24/7 on their HD subchannels. Those channels potentially could carry disaster and emergency preparedness information during nonemergencies. “The U.F. team has routinely spoken with a number of station leaders who have an interest in bringing BEACON to their local market once WUFT-HD4 89.1 Gainesville-Ocala goes live on Dec. 18,” he told Radio World prior to the announcement.

“The big void in emergency information right now is during recovery efforts,” Anstandig continued.

“In our study of emergency communications across the U.S., our country does a good job of delivering short bursts of information just in time. That is what EAS and WEA do very well—a tornado warning, for instance. However, what’s missing is everything what happens before an event and the days after the crisis. That’s when information becomes very fragmented. BEACON can provide immediately actionable information to help survivors find help.”

Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Division of Emergency Management, told Radio World the system was tested this year during Hurricanes Helene and Milton with some 4,000 tests.

He said BEACON ensures a unified, consistent message across platforms, thanks to the automatic capturing, prioritizing and translating of authorized public safety information.

“We can now push these emergency messages out to specific areas in English, Creole or Spanish. And not just those languages. I am from Jacksonville originally, where we have large Lithuanian and Yugoslavian communities, and if we [wanted to] use those languages we could, using University of North Florida radio,” he said.

The announcement was endorsed by Craig Fugate, a former Federal Emergency Management Administration administrator and executive director of FDEM. He was quoted by the organizations saying that a nationwide implementation would offer “an unprecedented opportunity to transform emergency messaging, with a unified platform for authorities to disseminate critical alerts and instructions in real time.”

This article initially appeared on TV Tech sister brand Radio World.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Following a filing by the NAB asking the Federal Communication Commission to extend a waiver that delayed the implementation of some emergency alert rules, the FCC’s Media Bureau is seeking comment on the issue.

As previously reported, the NAB filed a request asking the FCC to extend a waiver that had delayed implementation of a rule that requires broadcasters to provide an aural representation of visual, non-textual emergency information, such as radar maps or other graphics, on a secondary audio stream. The FCC said that the request indicates that because the waiver expired during the comment period on the Petition, “numerous large television station groups have ceased the display of such weather radar maps and similar visual images,” which “will harm the public.”

The waiver expired on November 26, 2024 and Media Bureau now seeking comment on whether to grant a retroactive extension of the previous waiver.

The original rule was adopted on April 8, 2013, with an original effective date of May 26, 2015, but has been waived and delayed several times “to the present day because a technical solution for automated descriptions of the information in such graphics does not exist,” the NAB said in a Nov. 15 filing.

In seeking comment on the request, the FCC said that "commenters should limit their submissions to the question of whether the Bureau should grant a retroactive extension of the waiver, and if so, the appropriate timeframe of such a waiver. Broader issues relevant to resolution of the Petition should be addressed in response to the November 25, 2024 Public Notice."

More information is available here.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—With a Nov. 26 deadline looming for the implementation of new Emergency Alert rules, the National Association of Broadcasters has filed a brief seeking a delay in implementing a requirement that broadcasters provide an audio translation of non-textual elements of emergency alerts, such as maps and graphics, so that the material is accessible to people with visual disabilities.

The FCC’s rulemaking regarding Section 79.2(b)(2)(ii) of its rules requires that visual, non-textual emergency information (e.g., weather radar maps) provided during non-newscast video programming be made aurally accessible on a station’s secondary audio program (SAP) channels.

The rule was adopted on April 8, 2013, with an original effective date of May 26, 2015, but has been waived and delayed several times “to the present day because a technical solution for automated descriptions of the information in such graphics does not exist,” the NAB said in a Nov. 15 filing. The current waiver expires Nov. 26.

In its filing, the NAB argued, “it remains impossible for stations to continue to provide important emergency information to viewers while complying with the audible crawl rule as written … Broadcasters are extremely proud of their emergency operations and have significant concerns for the public if the audible crawl rule takes effect.

“The FCC has stated that, if a station displays a visual image that conveys information duplicative of that provided in text crawls, it need not take additional steps to comply with the audible crawl rule,” the filing continued. “However, the rule itself is much less clear. Given the fear of significant enforcement fines and/or penalties, many stations feel compelled to apply the most cautious reading of the rule, which would require stations to directly or exactly aurally describe the information in moving images by converting the images to speech. However, that process is currently technologically impossible. Also, the rule does not mention that compliance can be met by running separate text crawls that provide equivalent information. The result is that many broadcasters will cease providing this important service rather than risk an FCC enforcement action.”

In the filing, the NAB asked for another 18-month extension of the existing waiver and urged “the FCC to concurrently reform the underlying rule. In particular, NAB requests a change to the audible crawl rule to specify that compliance is fulfilled if a station provides textual crawls that provide emergency information duplicative or equivalent to the information conveyed by the visual image. We believe this approach would provide a more practical, permanent resolution of this decade-long quandary and afford broadcasters the regulatory certainty needed to continue displaying such graphics while ensuring access to emergency information.”

To help with the rulemaking, the NAB has created a “draft best practices guide to help ensure that the content and frequency of text crawls provide access to emergency information equivalent to that conveyed by a visual image. NAB has shared the draft best practices with advocates for blind and low-vision individuals and looks forward to incorporating their input in the final product.”

The draft is available here.

“With the deadline looming, we would hope that the FCC acts quickly on this request while it considers practical ways in which to make this emergency information available,” the NAB concluded.

WASHINGTON—The FCC has proposed a fine of $146,976 against ESPN, the statutory maximum the agency can impose for violating emergency alert system rules.

The FCC said ESPN violated the rules when it aired a promo for the start of the 2023-24 NBA season on the ESPN network and companion network ESPN 2 that included EAS tones.

After receiving complaints on Oct. 20, 2023, the agency opened an investigation. During that probe, ESPN provided video recordings of the Oct. 20, 23 and 24 airings of the spot that included the tones. ESPN confirmed that the promo aired six times overall.

In its decision to propose the fines, the FCC said “the nature of EAS violations requires particularly serious consideration because, among other issues, such violations undermine the integrity of the EAS by desensitizing the public to the potential importance of warning tones. EAS violations therefore implicate substantial public safety concerns.”

In justifying the fines, the FCC also noted that ESPN had a history of violating EAS rules.

In 2021, the FCC Enforcement Bureau issued a $20,000 fine against ESPN for “willfully violating the Commission’s rules that prohibit the transmission of false or deceptive emergency alert system” tones during a program.

The FCC said the violation occurred during the airing documentary "30 for 30: Roll Tide/War Eagle" on Oct. 20, 2020. After receiving a complaint about the broadcast of the tones on Oct. 27, 2020, the FCC started an investigation and notified ESPN.

In a March 21, 2021 response, ESPN admitted the tones were broadcast during “Roll Tide/War Eagle,” but said they were part of a depiction of tornadoes on April 27, 2011, “for storytelling purposes" during the documentary.

“In calculating the appropriate forfeiture, we also consider ESPN’s past compliance record,” the FCC said in its Oct. 17 Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture. “ESPN has a history of noncompliance with respect to section 11.45 of the Commission’s rules. In 2015, ESPN paid a $280,000 forfeiture for violations of section 325(a) of the Act and section 11.45 of the Commission’s rules when it transmitted EAS Tones in the absence of a Permitted Use.”

In addition, “in 2021, ESPN paid a $20,000 forfeiture for violation of section 11.45 of the Commission’s rules when it transmitted EAS Tones in the absence of a Permitted Use,’ the FCC said. “We find ESPN’s prior history of EAS violations to be a significant factor to consider in determining the proposed forfeiture in this case.”

ESPN has 30 days to pay the fine or file an objection to the decision with the FCC. An ESPN spokesperson declined comment on the matter.

The full FCC ruling can be found here.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—As Hurricane Helene moves towards making landfall in Florida on Thursday evening as a Category 3 hurricane, Federal Communications Commission chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has outlined some of the efforts that the FCC is making to ensure that people have access to emergency information and that communications networks remain as functional as possible. 

Those efforts include activating the Disaster Information Reporting System, monitoring communications outages and working with broadcast associations, wireless carriers, and other communications providers in the expected path of Hurricane Helene.

“As Hurricane Helene prepares to make landfall on the Gulf Coast, the FCC continues coordinating with our government partners and industry to help keep communications networks as fully functional as possible,” Rosenworcel said. “We’ve activated our Disaster Information Reporting System for areas in Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia, so we can closely monitor communications outage data in the coming days and work to support restoration and recovery efforts.  We have also activated our Mandatory Disaster Response Initiative, which requires wireless providers to work together to reduce outages for the public.  We’ve deployed FCC staff to conduct surveys of communications services in targeted areas and to provide on-the-ground support, which will help federal and state agencies to assess the post-landfall impacts to vital communications services and infrastructure. Agency staff has also reached out to broadcast associations, wireless carriers, and other communications providers in the expected path of Hurricane Helene.  For communities directly in the path of the storm, please heed the instructions of your local officials and sign up to receive additional emergency alerts and warnings.  Our collective efforts now can save lives.”

The FCC also urged residents of the affected areas to charge their wireless phones, laptops, or tablets and follow other communications tips available on the FCC’s website to stay connected with family and friends. That information is available at www.fcc.gov/emergency.    

In addition the agency reported that the FCC’s Operations Center is available 24/7 to assist public safety, government, and communications industry stakeholders with emergency communications needs.  

Updates from the FCC related to Hurricane Helene are available at www.fcc.gov/helene.  

Even if broadcast becomes all MVPDs and internet—and we never use those big-power, tall towers again—they still hold high value for society. For broadcasters, they are either an expensive burden or a big opportunity.

For a century, we have enjoyed a social contract where we entertain and inform, especially in crisis, for anyone and everyone who has access to a receiver; in return for spectrum and the authorization to monetize it. How this works and the technology underpinning it has transformed in a thousand ways. Once, transmitters and a channel number were foundational. Today, few would notice if OTA vanished. This is not an existential crisis. However, it is disruptive. Done well, it will be very good in many ways.

If there were no other reasons for a next generation of broadcasting, Emergency Mass Communications would be more than enough. ATSC’s 3.0 Advanced Emergency Alerting and Informing (AEI) would cement OTA broadcasting’s relevance. Further, there is a good argument that AEI could reinvigorate NextGen development.

Further, as we have become exceedingly dependent on GPS, the world has been searching for a backup. Broadcast Positioning System (an alternative that could supplement GPS in case of failure) is doubtless the best of the alternatives.

Everything we might do with our transmitters depends on the number of receivers. Expanding our reach into phones, home routers/gateways, cars, etc. is far more imperative than TVs. Metcalfe’s law states that “the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” Today, broadcasters should be more motivated to “put 3.0 chips” in devices than attracting eyeballs.

If we want to keep our transmitters and spectrum—and there is no technical reason we can’t survive with only MVPDs and streaming—we should be steering to a favorable recasting of the social contract and infrastructure.

The idea that the wireless cell network is reliable enough for Emergency Mass Communications is absurd. The fragile wireless network collapses in any modest emergency. Even on a very bad day, scraped Earth incident, there has always—each and every time—been broadcast signals continuously relaying critical information. WEA and the wireless network is literally the fire extinguisher that doesn’t work in the presence of smoke.

No one is happy with EAS or WEA. AEI/BPS is the opportunity to bring Emergency Mass Communications in line with current technology and expectations, all the while increasing our relevance and reach. There isn’t a broadcast newsroom that doesn’t crave being the universal gateway to critical information.

Both BPS and basic AEI signaling are easy lifts that consume trivial spectrum. To us, this is nothing. To the world, this is huge. If we do our part and the FCC/FEMA pursues AEI/BPS we become more relevant.

With little drama, we should open the door to put ATSC 3.0 in more devices. It is that rare win-win all around.

Fred Baumgartner is a retired broadcast engineer. He once took time off to develop and promote EAS.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Public media stations in California, New York, Oregon and Texas will receive a total of up to $1.8 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to upgrade their equipment to provide enhanced emergency alerting.

The awards take the number grants awarded in the first round of funding for the Next Generation Warning System (NGWS) to 21. Funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the grant program is providing $34 million to public media stations to upgrade equipment and receive training to enhance emergency alerts, including the ability to TV stations to use ATSC 3.0 and radio stations to deploy comparable digitalk radio technologies, CPB said.

“Public media stations have long played a vital role in emergency alerting in communities across the country,” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “The Next Generation Warning System grant program helps public media organizations, especially in rural areas, replace and upgrade their infrastructure so that they can continue to keep their communities safe.” 

In 2022, FEMA selected CPB to establish and administer the NGWS grant progra

In June, CPB launched a Request for Applications (RFA) portal on the CPB website for a second round of funding. The total amount of NGWS grant funds available in this round is $48 million, approved in Fiscal Year 2023.

“FEMA is committed to building resilience by rapidly disseminating emergency communications to the public through diverse integrated pathways,” said FEMA IPAWS director Manny Centeno. “FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) provides a suite of tools and resources for local authorities to effectively send emergency communications to the public. We continue developing the Next Generation Warning System concept as we improve continuity and leverage new technologies, such as ATSC 3.0, that can reach the public wherever they are.”

The most recent recipients include:

• Northern California Educational TV - KIXE-TV, Redding, Calif., up to $857,105 to upgrade the overall transmission signal, increasing emergency alert access. KIXE-TV covers rural Northern California.
• St. Lawrence Valley Educational Television Council - WPBS-TV, Watertown, N.Y., up to $276,444 to replace an aging transmitter, making the station fully ATSC 3.0 ready and providing a stronger signal and reaching more communities with emergency alerting in this rural area, from the Adirondack Mountains to the St. Lawrence River.
• Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs/KWSO-FM, Warm Springs Ore., up to $158,749 to install and upgrade emergency alert equipment at the radio station and towers and to establish an alternate transmitter site in case of emergency.
• Texas A&M University - KAMU TV/FM, College Station, Texas, up to $486,214 to improve the resiliency of broadcast signal origination and boost redundancy of the station’s transmission and related emergency alerting in the Brazos Valley.

Of the 21 stations to receive NGWS grants so far from the first round of funding, six are in Alaska, three in New York and three in Texas.

For more information visit www.cpb.org.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.—PBS North Carolina has announced that Fred Engel will retire from his role as chief technology officer on August 31 after an illustrious career spanning 46 years. Chris Pandich, director of engineering services, will serve as interim chief broadcast engineer while a national search for Engel’s successor gets underway.

Engel, who joined PBS North Carolina in 2016, has been hailed as an industry leader for his invaluable contributions to innovative technology projects that serve the public good. In his role, he has developed new applications for PBS North Carolina’s TV broadcast platform to improve public safety communications, remote learning for students not connected to the Internet and security efforts.

“I’ve witnessed firsthand Fred’s deep commitment to the power of public media,” says David Crabtree, CEO and general manager of PBS North Carolina. “Among his many accomplishments, his instrumental role in developing communication devices for first responders stands out. What began as an idea written on a paper napkin has become a reality with the potential to save lives, leaving an indelible mark on our organization and our community. While Fred’s departure marks a loss for our team, we wish him nothing but the best in his future endeavors.”

Fred Engel’s long career has been nothing short of remarkable, PBS North Carolina said. 

Over 28 years at PBS member station WTTW in Chicago, he ascended from his position as an engineering maintenance technician to the role of vice president of technology. In 2004, his team garnered an Emmy Award for its work on building a high-definition video master control facility. During his six-year tenure at KET (Kentucky Education Television) as senior director of technology, Engel and his team spearheaded the establishment of streetside studios, the first for public broadcasting, in downtown Louisville.

Since joining PBS North Carolina in 2016, Engel has been a driving force behind the development of innovative applications for the cutting-edge television broadcast technology ATSC 3.0/NEXTGEN TV. His work, which includes the development of a digital paging service that enables more reliable and secure delivery of emergency information to first responders through a non-traditional use of PBS North Carolina’s TV broadcast platform, has garnered widespread recognition.

“I never envisioned what changes would take place when I moved to North Carolina,” says Engel. “Soon after my arrival, PBS North Carolina (then UNC-TV) was approached by public safety communications officials who had heard that ATSC 3.0 technology might be something that could benefit them. Well, the rest is history. Now PBS North Carolina is recognized as a leader in technology innovation, not only in the public broadcasting community but throughout the industry, nationally and internationally.”

As Engel transitions into this new phase of his life, PBS North Carolina reported that he remains committed to staying actively engaged in the industry, continuing to champion the utilization of NEXTGEN TV to enhance community safety and bridge the digital divide.

“I’ve been fortunate to work with passionate, dedicated, smart people who have been driven to serve,” Engel shares. “I’m proud to have been part of that.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.—As expected, the Federal Communications Commission voted at its August Open Meeting to establish a new alert code for delivering critical alert messages to the public over television, radio, and wireless phones that will help save missing and endangered persons. The vote was unanimous. 

In announcing the vote, the FCC noted that in 2023, more than 188,000 people went missing who fall outside of the criteria for AMBER Alerts. The new alert code adopted on August 7 will be particularly beneficial to Tribal communities, where American Indians and Alaska Natives are at a disproportionate risk of violence, murder, or vanishing.  

The new missing and endangered persons alerts within the nation’s Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alert system will help law enforcement agencies galvanize public attention to missing and endangered people of all ages who do not qualify for AMBER Alerts, including those who meet the criteria for Ashanti Alerts. 

The FCC reported that the move will also support efforts to raise critical public awareness of missing Indigenous persons. 

In particular, thousands of missing Indigenous women have disappeared from their homes. According to FBI statistics, in 2023, there were 10,650 reported missing American Indian/Alaska Native persons of which 3,269 were 18 years old or older.  

In addition, the new code can help mobilize public responses to missing Black persons who make up roughly 35% of missing persons over 18 years old despite being 12% of the U.S. population.

Tribal, state, and local law enforcement agencies originate alerts using the Emergency Alert System by selecting from a group of event codes based on the nature of the situation.  For example, “CAE” signifies a Child Abduction Emergency, otherwise known as an AMBER Alert.  The new “MEP” alert code for missing and endangered persons who do not meet the criteria for an AMBER Alert will enable a more rapid and coordinated response to these incidents.  

In addition to the new Emergency Alert System code for TV and radio alerting, the new rule will facilitate alerts on wireless phones, the FCC said.  Missing and endangered persons alerts will be sent through the Wireless Emergency Alert system through the use of existing alerting methodologies, which will ensure a swift implementation of the new code.  The FCC expects these wireless alerts will utilize the existing Imminent Threat class and the Public Safety Message WEA alert class.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has awarded up to $1.37 million to four public broadcasters to upgrade equipment to deliver enhanced emergency alerting.

To date, CPB has issued 17 grants through the first round of funding for the Next Generation Warning System (NGWS) grant program, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The latest public broadcasters to receive the grant include KMOS PBS in Warrensburg, Mo., PBS Fort Wayne (Ind.), KTOO Public Media (KTOO TV/FM) in Juneau, Alaska, and Kodiak Public Broadcasting/KMXT-FM in Kodiak, Alaska, CPB said.

“Public media stations have long played a vital role in emergency alerting in communities across the country,” said CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison. “The Next Generation Warning System grant program helps public media organizations, especially in rural areas, replace and upgrade their infrastructure so that they can continue to keep their communities safe.” 
FEMA selected CPB in 2022 to establish and administer the NGWS grant program, which funds public media stations to upgrade their equipment and receive training to enhance alerting and warning capabilities, including the ability to use NextGen TV broadcast technology and comparable digital broadcast technology for radio stations. The program prioritizes public media stations serving rural, tribal and underserved communities.

Grant details include:

• KMOS PBS, University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, Mo., up to $880,085 to replace aging broadcasting infrastructure and provide increased technical capacity to partner with local, state and federal emergency management officials in emergencies.
• Fort Wayne PBS, WFWA-TV, Fort Wayne, Ind., up to $185,086, to improve the reliability and resiliency of the broadcast station’s warning system and support the installation of several updated equipment components.
• KTOO Public Media, KTOO TV/FM, Juneau, Alaska, up to $252,209 to improve the station’s resilience and warning system infrastructure. KTOO is the local primary distribution point for Juneau and reaches tribal and other populations in outlying communities.
• KMXT-FM, Kodiak Public Broadcasting, Kodiak, Alaska, up to $51,670, to buy encoders to improve common alerting protocol capability, fill gaps in alert delivery and provide backup power systems to improve its infrastructure and resilience.

In June, CPB launched a Request for Applications (RFA) portal on the CPB website for a second round of funding for the NGWS grant program. The total amount of NGWS grant funds available in this round is $48 million, approved in Fiscal Year 2023, CPB said.

“FEMA is committed to building resilience by rapidly disseminating emergency communications to the public through diverse integrated pathways,” said FEMA IPAWS director Manny Centeno. “FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) provides a suite of tools and resources for local authorities to effectively send emergency communications to the public. We continue developing the Next Generation Warning System concept as we improve continuity and leverage new technologies, such as ATSC 3.0, that can reach the public wherever they are.”

More information on the grant program is available online.

More information on the CPB is available on its website.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced that the tentative agenda for the August Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, August 7, 2024 will include updates to EAS systems and additional efforts for combating robocalls. 

The FCC described the agenda items as follows: 

• Establishing a Missing and Endangered Persons Alert Code – The Commission will consider a Report and Order to establish a Missing and Endangered Persons event code that will provide law enforcement, EAS Participants, and WEA providers with a means to quickly disseminate information pertaining to missing and endangered persons cases. (PS Docket Nos. 15-91, 15-94)
• Protecting Consumers from Unwanted Artificial Intelligence Robocalls – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose steps to protect consumers from the abuse of AI in robocalls and robotexts alongside actions that clear the path for positive uses of AI, including its use to improve access to the telephone network for people with disabilities. (CG Docket No. 23-362)
• Strengthening a Key Tool for Combatting Robocalls – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose and seek comment on procedural measures to promote the highest level of diligence when providers submit required information to the Robocall Mitigation Database, technical validation solutions to identify data discrepancies in filings, and accountability measures to ensure and improve the overall quality of submissions in the Robocall Mitigation Database. (WC Docket No. 24-213; MD Docket No. 10-234)
• Restricted Adjudicatory Matter – The Commission will consider a restricted adjudicatory matter from the Media Bureau. 
• Enforcement Bureau Action – The Commission will consider an enforcement action.

The Open Meeting is scheduled to commence at 10:30 a.m. ET in the Commission Meeting Room of the Federal Communications Commission, 45 L Street, N.E., Washington, D.C.  While the Open Meeting is open to the public, the FCC headquarters building is not open access, and all guests must check in with and be screened by FCC security at the main entrance on L Street.  Open Meetings are streamed live at www.fcc.gov/live.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has announced that she has shared with her fellow commissioners draft final rules that, if adopted, would strengthen the security of the nation’s public alert and warning systems—the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts—against emerging cybersecurity threats.  

If adopted by a vote of the full Commission, the draft rules would require communications providers that participate in these systems to create, update, and implement cybersecurity risk management plans, the FCC reported. 

The Emergency Alert System delivers warnings to the public thorough radio and television. Wireless Emergency Alerts deliver warnings to consumers’ wireless phones.

The rules would also require Emergency Alert System participants, such as broadcasters and cable providers, to notify the Commission of equipment defects within 24 hours of discovery, which would provide the Commission with greater awareness of system availability and help identify persistent technical problems in this equipment.

In addition, the rules would ensure that Emergency Alert System participants have contingency plans for delivering alerts to the public.  

Just last week, the Department of Homeland Security urged regulators to ensure that owners and operators of communications networks and other U.S. critical infrastructure are implementing controls to improve their security and resilience to cybersecurity threats, including through the establishment of minimum cybersecurity requirements.

In October 2022, the Commission sought comments on proposals to improve the cybersecurity of the nation’s emergency alert systems in response to various security lapses and incidents.  In October 2023, the Commission and CISA co-hosted a public roundtable on alerting cybersecurity. 

The FCC said that the draft final rules, "which would reduce risks to communications networks, in keeping with a whole-of-government effort to establish cybersecurity requirements to support national security and public safety, are informed by this stakeholder input."  

As is the general practice for items circulated for a vote, the FCC reported that the rules would be released if adopted by the Commission.

The nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System in October produced much better percentages for both receipt and retransmission than a test in 2021, according to the FCC. But issues still remain. The test also revealed that the performance of EAS in several U.S. territories was significantly worse than in the states.

The commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau issued its report on the nationwide EAS test and the simultaneous test of Wireless Emergency Alerts.

This was the seventh nationwide EAS test; the first was held in 2011. The large majority of EAS participants, including radio stations, reported successful receipt and retransmission.

“The test demonstrated that the national EAS distribution architecture is largely effective as designed,” the bureau wrote, though it “also shed light on operational readiness failures that prevented some EAS participants to receive and/or retransmit the test alert.”

The test message was received by 96.6% of EAS participants, up from 89.3% two years prior. The overall retransmission success rate was 93.6%, up from 87.1%.

The bureau said that this “significant” improvement was likely due to initiation of the 2023 test alert via Common Alerting Protocol, which added resiliency, compared to the 2021 test, which was strictly done over the air.

But that still means that more than 6% of EAS participants failed to retransmit the alert and that more than 4% reported some kind of equipment-related complication during retransmission. “It is essential that the entire public be able to successfully receive alerts in order to take protective action during emergencies,” the bureau wrote.

Outdated Software
The nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System in October produced much better percentages for both receipt and retransmission than a test in 2021, according to the FCC. But issues still remain. The test also revealed that the performance of EAS in several U.S. territories was significantly worse than in the states.

The commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau issued its report on the nationwide EAS test and the simultaneous test of Wireless Emergency Alerts.

This was the seventh nationwide EAS test; the first was held in 2011. The large majority of EAS participants, including radio stations, reported successful receipt and retransmission.

“The test demonstrated that the national EAS distribution architecture is largely effective as designed,” the bureau wrote, though it “also shed light on operational readiness failures that prevented some EAS participants to receive and/or retransmit the test alert.”

The test message was received by 96.6% of EAS participants, up from 89.3% two years prior. The overall retransmission success rate was 93.6%, up from 87.1%.

The bureau said that this “significant” improvement was likely due to initiation of the 2023 test alert via Common Alerting Protocol, which added resiliency, compared to the 2021 test, which was strictly done over the air.

But that still means that more than 6% of EAS participants failed to retransmit the alert and that more than 4% reported some kind of equipment-related complication during retransmission. “It is essential that the entire public be able to successfully receive alerts in order to take protective action during emergencies,” the bureau wrote.

Where problems did occur, they involved equipment configuration issues, performance issues, audio quality issues, alerting source issues and clock errors.

“While test participants reported less than one-third as many performance complications as compared to 2021,” the bureau continued, “more test participants reported equipment configuration issues and equipment failures.” Outdated software was a notable issue.

“At the time of the test, approximately 23% of EAS equipment units representing over 4,500 EAS participants, were either using outdated software or were using equipment that no longer supported regular software updates.” Not surprisingly, equipment with software that is no longer supported had the lowest receipt and retransmission rates, 90% and 85%, respectively.

Of 72 National Public Warning System (Primary Entry Point) stations, two experienced technical issues receiving and retransmitting the alert, a decrease from seven of 76 NPWS stations in 2021 (approximately 9%).

These stations failed to receive the CAP alert via IPAWS as a result of internet issues. One specifically cited that their broadband internet service provider was experiencing an outage, while the other cited that the internet was “very slow.” These stations did not successfully receive the nationwide alert from the over-the-air sources that they monitored.

“As a practical matter, one way for EAS participants to reduce complications due to failure to receive the test alert, such as the complications discussed above, is to ensure that they monitor several independent sources of alerts,” the bureau wrote. “We also recommend that stations located far from NPWS stations consider the viability, technically and otherwise, of satellite sources of the broadcast alert.”

The test results suggest that EAS is far less reliable in U.S. territories.

Five of the six poorest-performing geographic regions were the Northern Mariana Islands (20.0% retransmission success), Guam (33.3%), American Samoa (66.7%), the U.S. Virgin Islands (88.9%) and Puerto Rico (89.7%).

The bureau noted that these territories “have been plagued by multiple tropical storms and typhoons in recent years including Super Typhoon Mawar affecting Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in late May 2023, and Hurricane Fiona affecting Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto in September 2022.” It recommended that its staff engage with EAS participants there about this situation and work with the local emergency communications committees, if necessary helping to reinvigorate the SECCs and pursue enforcement actions, to ensure that EAS is effective.

On the Wireless Emergency Alert side, most respondents reported successful receipt of the WEA test message, though there were areas where WEA delivery can be improved, “such as ensuring more consistent delivery and resolving issues concerning alert message audio tone and vibration cadence.” This was the third nationwide WEA test, but only the second directed to all WEA-capable cellular devices. To reach all mobile devices, the WEA portion of the test was sent as a National Alert, which subscribers cannot opt out of receiving.

In conclusion the bureau recommended, among other things, that the FCC “adopt rules to improve the operational readiness of EAS participants and participating CMS providers, as well as ensure that EAS participants are installing software updates in a timely manner and have plans for replacing equipment that is no longer supported by the manufacturer.”

It offered recommendations for EAS participants and CMS providers to improve the reliability and reach of WEA and the EAS, including in the territories. And it recommended that Congress require all CMS providers to support WEA, which is not currently the case.

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand Radio World.

An open letter to American broadcasters:

Whether serendipity or luck; we seem to be in an exceptional place. As the following article summarizes, it seems that we have the only combination of assets and technologies that make for effective Emergency Mass Communications. There are no practical alternatives.

 With NVISA and FEMA in the lab, and what we hear from several milieus about the interest and willingness to invest in public safety, we are at a tipping point.

 Acting as if our goal is to return TV to its bygone role as primary alerting and informing appliance is not helping. Smartphones dominate and “mobile first” is a respectable adoption strategy.

 Everything good and bad with emergency communications occurs at the user interface. No one is happy with the current brain-dead, inconsistently alerting everyone everywhere, test it until no one listens state of affairs.

 Sure, with 3.0 we have vastly better distribution and IP support, and presently broadcast news is uniquely the highpoint of electronic mass communications in crisis—but none of that matters without a national, universal, quality app and first-rate user experience.

 It’s time to ask Congress/FEMA/FCC… the people who represent and protect us from invasion to tornadoes… to build what saves lives and property with our 3.0/broadcast assets. Intentionally or accidentally, broadcasters have already done their part. We have coverage and a protocol begging to be used.

The field piece of development is probably best done in the "Switzerland" of PBS/CPB. The lab should be FEMA’s. The broadcaster’s role going forward is to make sure this works with and enhances our news and our other assets.

 Or maybe there is a better path?

Fred Baumgartner

This article originally appeared in The Spectrum Monitor and is the third in a series about NextGen Broadcasting:

Radio and public safety have always and forever been bound together. The lives radio has saved and the reduction in human suffering is colossal. The Spectrum Monitor (TSM) readers, especially first responders, know this in ways others do not.

Mass communications during an emergency has been broadcasting’s highest calling. For the most part, outside of weekly (or more often) testing of the Emergency Alert System (EAS), broadcast isn’t about emergencies—until it is. A major fire, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, eruption, industrial accident, etc., does tend to completely consume broadcast media’s attention when it occurs. 

Historically, both amateur radio and broadcast justify their spectrum grants with the public role they play when things go badly. The FCC takes this very seriously, issuing more notices of violation and fines for EAS than any other infraction.

In 1990, AM radio was king, the World Wide Web was born, a radio telephone call needed an operator to assist, local TV news was an hour a day, and NOAA weather radio (NWR) was sparse. When EAS was launched in 1997, we were just learning that simply ringing the alarm bell was not enough, and frequently unintentionally deadly. Our world, threats and especially our behaviors have changed since then.

The Digital Era
Smartphones... Emergency Mass Communications (EMC) is smartphones. When people evacuate, they do not take their TVs with them. Only a very few scramble for their wind-up AM radio. People in danger take their purses/wallets and… phones.

The singular and growing dependance on smartphones for most human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions is fact.

Humans over the age of five have their smartphones with them at all times. If you need your phone to start your car, park, open a hotel room door, order a hamburger, shop, or your location is being tracked by friends, family and advertisers, you know the disconnected, helpless, empty feeling of having misplaced or discharged your phone.

There is some investigation that suggests that smartphone dependency has the unintended consequence of increasing milling time. AEA/AEI on the other hand, directly ties critical information to the alert, thus eliminating search time and one would think reduce milling saving lives.

Natural Hazards Center Director Dennis Mileti (1945-2021) defined and studied “milling” as EAS was being developed. It is human nature for people to want to validate and spread the word of an emergency following an alert. Milling wastes valuable time and is often fatal. 

It’s not all bad; spreading the word quickly is probably why survival rates are highest in tight/dense communities. Milling ends, and survival activities begin, when the crisis “becomes real,” to the participants. In a world of two-minute emergencies, there is no time to search or text, just time to act.

WEA predates the smart in smartphone. About five years into WEA, several emergency alerting apps made bids to intelligently fill the information gap. FEMA, the Red Cross, some schools, companies, and many local emergency management offices, and much of social media, offer many apps that residents can subscribe to… so many that there are posts and sites dedicated to advising which emergency apps and how many anyone should have on their phone. This fragmented EMC delivery.

By their nature, these apps address pieces of EMC, not the whole of EMC. The apps that focus on a few threats, where there is some intelligence (usually in the form of a local emergency management office or weather service) work well for their sphere of emergencies. The local or county emergency management office that invested in an app to deal with wildfires and has diligently marketed their app to citizens with the time and patience to download and the skills to configure the apps and maintain them, does well in their narrow circumstance. 

Social media that scrape other sources for the grist that they warp into the attention-grabbing notifications that fuel and package EMC in click bait, might be notably delayed, unreliable, and soaked in crowd sourced misinformation… but they do work.

Bottom line? The state of EMC is a fragmented mix of the ancient and many emerging apps.

Missing Platform
It seems logical that that EMC should use every distribution platform it can. Radio, TV, Wireless, and social media (for better or worse) are ubiquitous. Signage and sirens (the ones with voice message speakers being most useful). However, streaming and satellite don’t help and cable support ranges from nonexistent to rather mature and well developed.

Arguably, smartphone dependence is so domineering that no other platform is required. As our dependence on smartphones continues to increase, soon enough the people reached by broadcast radio, etc., will become insignificant. But, if life is precious, and not everyone has their smartphone on their person, and wireless isn’t 100% reliable, it makes sense to alert on all platforms simultaneously… if for no other reason than to alert people to check their phones.

In addition to smartphones, NextGen Broadcast’s AEA/AEI (Advanced Emergency Alerting and Advanced Emergency Informing) is a good fit for cable, satellite, and internet.

Smart is Good
Some think that technology constantly pushes intelligence to the edge. Nowhere does this make more sense than in EMC. In EAS, and WEA, the radio, TV or device is dumb. It simply makes noise or displays the messages that are broadcast to it and every other receiver. In EAS, there is “where, what, when” information encoded in the FSK signaling we hear at the start of every alert. 

This information allows EAS decoding receivers—a small brain is required—to activate when wanted. Most people might own an automatic NWS radio, but home EAS receivers are rare. The only people who directly receive an EAS activation are those watching or listening to a participating station where everyone gets everything because unlike AEA/AEI, EAS supersedes programming. 

This forces the broadcast station into a “Sophie’s choice” situation as to what alerts are passed on. Is a tornado on the edge of the coverage area worth interrupting the Dallas Cowboys game? WEA is somewhat better, but the practical installations are still challenged to effectively target EMC. Occasionally waking to a 2 AM Amber alert for an adjacent state is where the state of WEA is after 10-years.

For EMC, a smart, location aware device that is always with us is a godsend. The smartphone has already displaced weather radios… along with cameras, watches, cash… 

Want the same functions on a TV? There are only man-made barriers to this. Developing AEA/AEI on smartphones and gateways is fairly straightforward. These are well known mature and stable environments. Porting AEA/AEI to TVs is fairly easy for those TVs that have the memory, processing power, hooks, and storage to support it. Developing on multiple TVs from multiple manufacturers? … no one has that much money or patience.

Smartphones have an amazing user interface with incredible flexibility and full bidirectional connection. TV remotes are inflexible molded plastic devices with a few or many molded buttons. The best you can say about TV remotes is that navigating information is ugly. Some TVs use smartphones as a remote control (so called “second screen”). In this case, the TV becomes superfluous.

Assuming the code isn’t written with the same process that gave us healthcare.gov and is more like the low friction apps you find while online shopping (and there is adequate intelligence behind it) AEA/AEI solves all the problems we’ve substantiated since EAS was adopted. 

First and foremost, AEA/AEI stops over-testing, over-alerting and mistargeting. Second is the availability of critical follow-on information. Having to search on an overloaded network for life and death information kills people. Language and disability access are no longer obstacles.

Bottom line? EMC is about smartphones. With a smart, well-designed, self-configuring, pre-installed app—AEA/AEI resolves the human behavior issues and user limitations—even the ones we inadvertently created.

UHF High Power
Smartphones on the wireless network have one serious, fatal, but resolvable limitation. In any medium to major crisis, the wireless network collapses.

While broadcast supports an infinite number of simultaneous users, common carrier wireless cannot support the flood of individual demands for information typical in an emergency. The capacity required does not exist. Intuitively, one would think that when the network chokes, the milling time increases dramatically and of course the lost information would have often been lifesaving. 

Wireless requires multiple towers with often single-thread interconnect. This wireless architecture is far more fragile than broadcast which tends to be hardened, staffed and secured with backup power and everything else. When a wireless carrier or a tower fails, the people it serves are disconnected. When a high-power UHF broadcaster fails… the receiver simply retunes to the next strongest signal of many.

UHF is vital. UHF is necessary for building penetration and its big service area. It also needs to be built into the smartphone. Qualcomm put UHF TV into cellphones a decade ago, but no one has been able to do acceptable AM or FM reception. TSM readers know well the laws of physics and the inferiority of VHF and MW transmission in an urban or indoor environment.

In an emergency, you want to “carpet bomb” the population with a multitude of resilient high power RF. Wireless is extremely useful as events evolve, but EMC distribution shouldn’t rely on a low power, countless single-points-of-failure system that can’t survive a “scraped earth event.” 

Further, the complex and exposed wireless network is vulnerable to cyber-attack and instabilities. Consider that AT&T, including Firstnet (the wireless service that AT&T contracts to independently serve first responders) failed nationally on Feb. 22, 2024 for hours. In July 2022, KDDI in Japan and it’s 39 million customers experienced, “…the biggest glitch in our history,” according to KDDI chief Makoto Takahashi, taking the entire system down for two full days. Rogers Canada has had multiple outages over the last three years impacting all of its Canadian customers. 

And it’s not just wireless carriers. CenturyLink took three states of their internet customers “off the air” pre-Covid.

The unfailing and simple architecture of broadcast makes it much less likely to fail or fall victim to cyberattack. There has never ever been a time or event where more than one broadcast signal didn’t survive.

Intelligence
EMC is only as good as the information disseminated.

“Rich media,” beyond simple text, audio and video, is valuable. Searchable data, maps and visuals are very useful, expected, and rare. Emergency management organizations generally have neither the staff, equipment, nor expertise to prepare much more than simple text alerts. 

TV news organizations are the American machine that aggregates information from all of the stakeholders, federal, state, and local governments, power companies, utilities, first responders, and the scene itself. Broadcast news can put cameras on the ground and in the air and put authorities in front of a microphone. Nothing new here. Broadcasters routinely forgo advertising revenues to cover major news of emergencies. However, legacy alerting is at best loosely attached to news.

Indispensably, broadcast news has the relationships to validate information.

NextGen AEA/AEI
Conelrad, EBS, EAS, WEA, sirens, signage, are or were all alerting systems under the control of broadcasters and to some degree emergency management, that could interrupt programming so that sometimes on-air talent or automated weather service speech synthesis can speak to the situation. 

AEA/AEI directly connects all of emergency management to a user’s smartphone where the decisions of what to alert for and in what manner are made under the user’s control. AEA/AEI can share information in the manner that we are used to, without pre-NextGen broadcasting’s analog era limitations.

NextGen AEA/AEI smartphones (and other equipped devices like TVs) periodically check for AEA/AEI messages in addition to alerts via native WEA. For the OTA part, there is a balance between battery life and urgency. When a pair of bits in the ATSC 3.0 bootstrap (the lowest most secure data path) indicate that there is a message, the smartphone grabs it and runs it through filters. 

The filter asks if this affects my location and if this is a situation where people should be notified or awakened. An Amber alert might wait until people wake up. An F-5 tornado in the neighborhood demands immediate attention.

No television station has to decide whether to interrupt programming, because AEA/AEI unlike EAS… doesn’t interrupt programming. On a TV, the video squeezes back, and there are three loud “attention” beeps with a text crawl. A viewer can dismiss, dig deeper… or grab the smartphone, which is doing the same things, and run for cover.

Every AEA alert is on every transmitter nearly simultaneously and goes to every phone without delay. Following the “in emergencies, all delivery methods are used” guidance, the internet and wireless are also useful paths. Ideally, the phone sees the same message from many places—and filters out the redundancies.

Where are We?
Both EAS and WEA have devolved into systems that neither broadcasters nor wireless providers have a positive incentive to maintain or improve. The public and emergency community complain about both. The last time we heard anything about EAS, broadcasters through the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) got Congress to force car manufacturers to continue support of AM radios, claiming that AM/EAS plays a critical role. 

The reality is somewhat nuanced. 

Today, “full service” radio stations are almost always AM/FM or FM only; only larger metropolitan areas support the necessary full-service station. While radio news operations have declined, TV and digital news has boomed. Radio on the dashboard is far more difficult and distracting to tune than the days of five buttons and a tuning knob. When you see “tune to 1610” traveler information signs while driving a rental car, you are unlikely to figure out how to listen safely without first pulling over.

My own experience is that I have not received a useful emergency message via my AM radio in many years. On the other hand, my cellphone has warned me of bad weather and with the help of the smartphone, I have navigated around hail, etc. at least a few times each year. AM radio used to do that, but not anymore—which is OK because the smartphone does this so much better—WEA messages are even displayed on my dashboard via the car/phone handsfree Bluetooth link.

As you might expect, most of broadcaster’s activities surround reducing their investment in EAS (including NAB and largely iHeart’s move to virtualize EAS to avoid replacing hardware), news and other staff intensive programming.

EAS does little good for broadcast news, sometimes interrupting live tornado coverage with a less informed and often delayed NWS issued tornado warning. Broadcasters, especially the ones that embrace the vision of a broadcast digital news operation that is ubiquitous, interactive, and low friction, do have motivation to develop AEA/AEI. 

It expands the news department’s reach and gives them a lower friction platform for disseminating information from the trivial to the ultra-critical. AEA/AEI builds on and can deepen a station’s relationship with its viewers. Unfortunately, EAS drives viewers and listeners away with constant false alarms, tests and untargeted use.

So Where is the NextGen EMC Application?
The broadcast app that supports AEA/AEI has yet to be written. There have been several starts, each of which stalled at the mockup stage. We’ve seen what it might look like, but not how it works.

Unfortunately, vaporware is impossible to demonstrate and very difficult to describe outside of abstractions. If you want to show emergency management, broadcasters, regulators, or the general population AEA/AEI, we will have to build it.

Within ATSC is the “I-team.” The only implementation effort under the ATSC umbrella is to develop AEA/AEI. In the I-team’s long history, they have only had access to BAs (aka "Broadcast Apps" installed on the smartphone by the broadcasters) that function on an EAS level, meaning that they have yet to experience a BA that does the advanced filtering functions, or supports rich media information dissemination. ATSC and their I-team have nothing close to a deployable AEA/AEI app.

As this is written, NVISA and FEMA have set up a NextGen Emergency Mass Communications laboratory in Maryland. This is all very good. For now, without an AEA/AEI app and mobile devices, all that can be done here is to play with TVs and basic prototype BAs able to do little more than alarm. When we do have a BA, this is the place to test it and make it work before it is released into the real world. FEMA has a test version of IPAWs very useful for this.

3.0 Enabled Smartphones
NextGen AEA/AEI depends on a smartphone running an AEA/AEI app that receives information via the wireless network when available, and information embedded in NextGen UHF Broadcast high power, big tower transmission when wireless access becomes impossible.

India seems to be the place where NextGen smartphones are taking off. Not so much in America.

Next Step
Without a BA and 3.0 chips in smartphones, we do not have resilient, intelligent EMC.

For broadcasters, what revenue potential there is in funding the BA is maybe from licensing what has never been licensed before (EAS is public domain) and/or betting that broadcast news can someday benefit from the AEA/AEI platform. It is also uncomfortable for broadcasters to depend on a competitor for a critical piece of broadcast architecture. 

There have been rumors of various players crafting a proprietary BA, usually more focused on monetization issues than AEA/AEI. So far, there is no AEA/AEI progress. There have been two efforts to cooperatively advance this endeavor within the industry. 

NAB Pilot’s effort ended quietly, apparently lacking broadcaster support and some member opposition to NAB supplying a universal “free” app. Later, NVISA invited broadcasters and vendors to cooperatively do such. NVISA (NextGen Video Information Systems Alliance) received no response from the major players.

As mentioned above, ATSC’s I-team dedicated to AEA/AEI implementation has no resources beyond the power of the regularly scheduled meeting. Also, ATSC is a standards organization, so as one would expect, implementation—as much as it is needed—is well outside ATSC’s tradition and resources.

AEA/AEI serves the public good. As a nation, we do invest in our security and safety. In 2006, Congress put $106 million into the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act. This funded Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) as well as other upgrades to EMC. More recently, congress has designated funds to upgrade EMC, in several different “buckets.” While AEA/AEI is likely the most important thing we should do, a lot more expensive and less important things seem to be on current agenda.

This is also close to the charter of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who with PBS, have a history of nurturing similar technologies such as closed caption in the early 1970s. That lead to the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990. PBS has been active in the EMC field with WARN, a system that backs up IPAWS (Integrated Public Alert & Warning System) internet delivery. There have been several NextGen proof-of-concept demos within public broadcasting for the benefit of first responders and EMC.

It is also better that there be just one AEA/AEI BA that operates in a manner where everyone everywhere can easily understand it and navigate. Competing BAs can create unnecessary friction. This is software and NextGen is “extensible,” meaning that the system can be updated and fine-tuned over time.

The bottom line is, that if we want reliable and powerful Emergency Mass Communications, FEMA and the FCC, if not congress, have to say so.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Federal Communications Commission chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has announced a tentative agenda for the March Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, March 14, 2024 that includes items relating to emergency alerts, cable and satellite pricing and a possible redefinition of what constitutes “high-speed” internet services. 

More specifically, the FCC’s tentative agenda includes these items: 

• ‘All-In’ Cable and Satellite TV Pricing – The Commission will consider a Report and Order to require cable and satellite TV providers to specify the “all-in” price for video programming services in promotional materials and on subscribers’ bills in order to allow consumers to make informed choices.  (MB Docket No. 23-203)
• Missing and Endangered Persons' Emergency Alert Code – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose to facilitate the more efficient and widespread dissemination of alerts and coordinated responses to incidents involving missing and endangered persons, an issue that is particularly prevalent in Tribal communities.  (PS Docket Nos. 15-91, 15-94)
• Re-Defining ‘High-Speed’ Internet to Match Market Realities – The Commission will consider the draft 2024 Section 706 Report, which, if adopted, would fulfill the Commission’s statutory responsibility under section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and raise the fixed speed benchmark for advanced telecommunications capability to 100/20 Mbps.  (GN Docket No. 22-270)
• Cybersecurity Labeling Program for Smart Products - The Commission will consider a Report and Order to create a voluntary cybersecurity labeling program for wireless consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products, which would help consumers make informed purchasing decisions, differentiate trustworthy products in the marketplace, and create incentives for manufacturers to meet higher cybersecurity standards. (PS Docket No. 23-239)
• Single Network Future: Supplemental Coverage from Space – The Commission will consider a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would advance the Commission’s vision for a single network future in which satellite and terrestrial networks work seamlessly together to provide coverage for consumer handsets that neither network can achieve on its own.  (GN Docket No. 23-65; IB Docket No. 22-271)

More information is available at the FCC’s Open Meeting page: www.fcc.gov/openmeeting.  

The Open Meeting is scheduled to commence at 10:30 a.m. ET on March 14 in the Commission Meeting Room of the Federal Communications Commission, 45 L Street, N.E., Washington, D.C.  Open Meetings are streamed live at www.fcc.gov/live. 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed that the FCC add a new alert option/code that would allow the system to deliver critical messages to the public over television and radio about missing and endangered persons.  

In announcing the proposal, Rosenworcel said that adding a new “Missing and Endangered Persons” alert code to the nation’s Emergency Alert System would help law enforcement provide timely alerts to galvanize public attention to missing native and indigenous persons, as well as other groups, and build on efforts to collect comprehensive data on these cases. The alert option would be similar to the use of AMBER Alerts to help locate missing children.

“Law enforcement agencies successfully use AMBER Alerts on TV and radio to help mobilize public attention and recover abducted children,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. “But we do not have a similar code in the Emergency Alert System dedicated to sounding the alarm over other missing and endangered persons, particularly the thousands of missing native and indigenous women who have disappeared from their homes never to be seen again. Creating a new ‘Missing and Endangered Persons’ alert category can close this gap, help ensure no person who is missing and in danger is left behind, and save lives.” 

“Violence against Native people is a crisis, and far too many families and communities have suffered as a result,” added Senator Ben Ray Luján (D), New Mexico in a statement supporting the proposal. “The federal government must take more decisive action to properly notify their loved ones and locate these individuals to keep families together. I’m glad the FCC is taking necessary steps to establish an alert code for missing and endangered persons that will broadcast critical information that could save lives and prevent more harm to Native communities and Tribal Nations."

The FCC said that the draft proposal of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the alerts was given to other commissioners on Feb. 21. They are expected to vote on it during the agency’s March 14, 2024, Open Meeting.

The draft proposal is expected to be publicly available on Feb. 22 at: www.fcc.gov/march-2024-open-commission-meeting.

The FCC also noted that alert originators, such as local public safety officials, use the Emergency Alert System by selecting from a group of fixed event codes based on the nature of the situation. For example, “CAE” signifies a Child Abduction Emergency, otherwise known as an AMBER Alert.  

If adopted by a vote of the full Commission, the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, would seek public comment on creating a new “MEP” alert code for missing and endangered persons who do not meet the criteria for an AMBER Alert.  The proposal would also pose questions about the relationship of this potential new alerting category with the Wireless Emergency Alert system, which does not use event codes like the Emergency Alert System does.