Mobile EAS Effort Nears Operationalization Phase

The technical group heading the standardization process will ask the ATSC board to approve the technology, making the mobile emergency alert system a part of the mobile ATSC standard, said Jay Adrick, broadcast technology vice president at Harris Broadcast. The standard would allow interoperability with existing receivers, he said. Once the final standardization process is complete, the technology will be a standard “and not something that’s going to change so anyone who wants to build equipment, whether they're receivers or a server that would issue the messaging at the station end, they've got a document to design against,” he said. “When the standard was developed, it left a placeholder for emergency alerts,” he added. “This project was to add the technical substance to the standard so everybody could build to it or adopt it."

The next phase involves the “operationalization,” said John Lawson, Mobile500 Alliance executive director. That includes “deployment of the alert generating software that transmits the signal as part of the mobile DTV over-the-air signal,” he said. Because of broadcast stations’ long involvement in legacy EAS, “it’s not much of a stretch to be directly connected to FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] for alerts generated there,” he said. One of FEMA’s less-public roles is the continuity of government, Lawson said. “They're the ones who have the responsibility to ensure that the president can reach the American public in an emergency, to as many media outlets as possible.” FEMA “has taken on the responsibility of aggregating emergency alerts from state, local and tribal governments and retransmitting them by secure Internet delivery,” he said. Mobile EAS is designed to handle alerts “at all levels from presidential down to local neighborhoods, and a lot of that will be at broadcaster discretion since the law only requires that we carry the presidential alert,” he added.

Stations that have demonstrated the technology include KOMO-TV Seattle, and CBS affiliate WRAL-TV Raleigh, N.C., Lawson said. WHUT-TV Washington, Alabama Public Television, WGBH-TV/FM Boston and other public broadcasters have committed to implementing the technology (CD Feb 28 p9). APTV has “installed all the equipment provided in the original grant, which will include service for the Birmingham and Montgomery areas,” an APTV spokesman said. APTV’s WBIQ Birmingham is awaiting the handsets that will receive the EAS/DTV signals, he said.

LG Electronics designed the prototype of the handset receivers, said John Taylor, an LG spokesman. When the final standard is granted, the receivers could be on the market this year, he said. The project is “aligned perfectly with broadcasters’ mission to provide emergency alerts in times of crisis, whether it’s a weather crisis or a terrorist attack,” he said. There are benefits of mobile DTV and mobile EAS to deliver multimedia alerts to handheld devices, he said: “It’s something that broadcasters are going to embrace from a policy standpoint,” and as a good use of broadcast spectrum.

There’s awareness among emergency organizations of the capability, said Anne Schelle, who heads the NAB mobile TV membership and used to run the Open Mobile Video Coalition before it was absorbed into the association. “We've been talking about it with emergency organizations and there’s a lot of interest in it, because it’s another way to reach consumers with information that matters,” she said. “If you look at broadcasting today, they're typically the last man standing in any disaster, because their towers are built to withstand very difficult conditions.” The towers are usually located in areas that are centralized and they transmit over a wide area, she said.

The involvement of broadcasters in the mobile EAS effort gives one more way to get critical information to people, said Suzanne Goucher, president of the Maine Association of Broadcasters. In lessons from Superstorm Sandy and the derecho, “the wireline and wireless networks are very vulnerable and aren’t hardened to the degree that broadcast infrastructure is,” she said. “In M-EAS, we all ought to think about how to make sure the messaging is coming from an authoritative source.” MAB is part of the National Alliance of State Broadcasters Associations, which will join NAB in hosting an EAS forum next month in Washington, she said. “We hope to get state, local and federal organizations engaged in the discussion.”