WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) and One Media 3.0, a subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group, have launched the nation’s first pilot project to use Next Generation Broadcast to disseminate Advanced Emergency Information.

“The jurisdictions that we represent are always looking for more and better ways to inform the public during emergencies,” said Scott Boggs, managing director, homeland security and public safety at COG. "We see NextGen AEI as a powerful new tool for both public warning and providing vital information for recovery after disaster strikes. Because it uses over-the-air broadcast signals, AEI can be especially effective for reaching underserved audiences.”

According to Jerald Fritz, executive vice president strategic and legal affairs at One Media 3.0, the pilot project is an opportunity to showcase the life-saving capabilities of NextGen Broadcast. 

“Sinclair and One Media 3.0 have developed an open-source broadcaster app that provides a range of new consumer services, with AEI being the most powerful from a public service perspective," Fitz said. "Sinclair has made a huge investment in local journalism at our stations across the country. Working with the COG to voluntarily deploy AEI through the 7 News newsroom paves the way to extend our ‘first informer’ role to many more markets,” he said.

The pilot program will provide free, over-the-air redundancy to emergency messaging currently sent by local governments via text, email. social media, and other system platforms. 

One Media 3.0, through its affiliated WJLA (7 News) newsroom, will also provide enhanced, rich media supplements to those emergency messages that meet its newsworthy criteria.

Initially, the pilot will focus on emergency messages from Arlington and Fairfax Counties in Northern Virginia and the District of Columbia. The pilot will be expanded to other area jurisdictions in coming months. The pilot program will initially use the facilities of WJLA’s sister station in Washington, WIAV, and then migrate to WJLA 7 News with its broader reach.

NextGen TV standard, aka ATSC 3.0, enables exceptionally advanced alerting and informing tools, One Media and COG stressed. 

Rather than simple text crawls across a TV screen that a tornado is approaching, for example, NextGenTV powers a much more robust signal that can render real time doppler radar, weather images, evacuation routes, shelter locations, flood maps – and do it in multiple languages, the backers of the pilot program said. 

In addition, the messages can be geo-targeted to just the area affected by the emergency warning based upon inputs by the viewer. Not limited to weather emergencies, the new tool will be employed for virtually all emergencies including civil unrest, hazardous spills, and AMBER Alerts.

This Advanced Emergency Information (AEI) can include both alerts and vital recovery information received on a wide range of enabled consumer devices and connected vehicles. Because TV stations operate independently of the cellular network and have backup power, they can continue to distribute emergency messages even when the cellular network and electric grids are down. 

The pilot is an outgrowth of the AWARN Washington, DC Roundtable, which brought together local TV broadcasters and emergency managers from across the National Capital Region. The discussions centered on the voluntary deployment of Advanced Emergency Information using the NextGen platform and ways to continue COG’s longtime commitment to supporting emergency communications.

AWARN Executive Director John Lawson said the National Capital Region pilot is an extension of a dialogue at the national and grassroots levels between broadcasters and emergency managers in several regions. 

“Through our AWARN roundtables, we found that technology is only the front-end of the conversation,” Lawson said. “Just as important is developing the relationships between local stations and emergency managers to actually use the technology. The Washington AEI pilot is a testbed for both technical capabilities and the working relationships between broadcasters and emergency managers that are vital to keep the public safe,” he said.

Anyone in the WIAV (display Channel 58) viewing area who has a NextGen TV set or a NextGen set-top converter box should be able to receive the emergency messages from WIAV. As other devices, including NextGen-enabled phones, are deployed, those too will benefit from this sophisticated new emergency tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONDON—The White House is ready for its close-up. The home of the president of the United States will serve as the backdrop for the new 4K/UHD broadcast studio from Celebro Media. Celebro says that the newly constructed studio is the first U.S. studio to be fully 4K/UHD functioning and features IP technology and multi-camera capabilities.

Celebro Media is making the studio space available for news broadcasters on an ad hoc basis during the run-up to the 2018 mid-term elections. It can also serve as a pop-up studio during breaking news stories.

The studio is fitted with NewTek’s IP Series, a software-driven, modular video production system with access to video sources and video mixing options. It is designed for the latest IP video-production techniques while also being backwards compatible. Rotolight’s Anova Pro 2 LED units will serve as the studio’s lighting and Riedel will supply all real-time signal distribution, communications and data transport solutions.