NCTA's Sachs Talks About the 'Pig'

[Stargazer]

I seen in a post a good while back where people were talking about this and how the government in the future may be able to turn on the tv when it is off and broadcast the alert.

 

[James Long]

The premise is there is an emergency in your area, and the EAS goes off on your cable TV, the family with EAS is able to evacuate while the satellite guy knows nothing is going on in his area.

My suggestion to E* is to ADD that capability.

NWS Severe Storm and Tornado Warnings are on the national wire feed. All they would have to do is relate that to the receiver (using the county FIPS codes that broadcast EAS uses) and pop it up on the screen like the new "Interactive" ads with the SELECT button. Put up a banner that says EAS ALERT and the user can click for the details.

A better version would have a menu that allowed for picking the alert level and results. Perhaps auto-tune to the alert if it is a WARNING and put up the select banner if it is a WATCH. Let the customer decide what caused the interruption, and have a channel 9501 that could always be selected to see the latest warning information.

It would be nice if they added a radar channel too. These would be data streamed like the rest of OpenTV. The best battle against the CableTV company's EAS panic would be to beat them at the game.

JL

 

[James Long]

give me a break. If there was some big emergency, hasn't anyone ever heard of a RADIO!?!?!?!

Yep, and it is great when it works --- but in the EAS chain it relies heavily on the decisions of one or two key stations in each region. If they do not air a properly encoded EAS alert, NO STATION in that region gets the information via EAS. They have to watch their own wire services and decide if they want to originate EAS on their own.

BTW: The required part of EAS includes**:
1) National Alerts (not yet used, but this would be for national emergencies)
2) National Tests (not used, but theoretical)
3) Monthly Tests (originated by the key "LP" stations and forwarded)
4) Weekly Tests (originated by each station)

Tornado Warnings are optional. In fact everything else is 100% optional, even for the LP stations. The biggest flaw in EAS, IMHO. Also stations run on automation where even if the NWS reported a tornado nobody would see it for hours.

BTW: Have you noticed that the things Cable is most proud of, locals and EAS, are things they are REQUIRED by the FCC to have and are not features that they invented out of the "goodness of their heart".

JL

**IIRC No station in NYC nor elsewhere in the US activated EAS on 9/11/01

 

[Stargazer]

They could use the spotbeam satellites to add this functionality.

 

[James Long]

They could use the spotbeam satellites to add this functionality.

EAS packets are so small that they could stream them with the auth stream that is on every transponder. It doesn't matter what you are tuned to when you activate a receiver, your channels are added. The same could be done for the EAS alerts. 250 characters per alert --- that isn't much cost.

The radar map data could be on the spots if there were too many for a CONUS feed. (BTW - I'm not talking live video radar, just a single frame feed.) That I would expect to have to change transponder to get. And it wouldn't matter if one's local isn't on a spot beam ... there are spots covering all of the US.

Come on E* -- give us live weather!

JL

 

[BobMurdoch]

Our local cable company has EAS and when it goes off the EAS message is scrolled on the bottom of EVERY channel. (I believe that 1 channel kicks in and overrides everything)

That is the way the cable company around here does it too.

Last spring they started doing it on "weather alerts" too and they got so many complaints about it they stopped doing it on the premium channels.

That's the great thing about watching standard def TV in the "Wide Zoom" format on my Sony HD monitor. All of that gets chopped off at the bottom. (I switch to "Full" when watching ESPNews or something similar in visual format with lots of text on the screen)

I was watching the WB Denver feed of Angel when the EAS kicked in and an Amber Alert started crawling along the bottom. First time I had seen the EAS in a long time.......

 

[Stargazer]

Perhaps they could implement something in the Closed Captioning for this as well.

 

[video62]

Yea, it sure seems like DBS could do something with EAS and FIPS codes. The state + county code could be entered via a setup menu along with checkboxes on what you want to be warned for.

 

[Stargazer]

Thats a great idea video62. Perhaps when you enter your zip code to get the dish pointing screen it could automatically use that to give you your local warnings.