[EAS] Cable TV Problems

[Adrienne Abbott]

Eric wrote: My cable system (and the many others I have seen recently) does
a perfectly fine job of running a crawl and audio through my cable box so
that it goes on top of whatever I am watching (even a previously recorded
show).

Your cable system must have all-new equipment and all-new set top boxes.
Ours (here in Nevada) do not. What subscribers here see depends on the age
and type of set top box that they received from the cable company. And if
the subscribers are using really old equipment, they don't even have a set
top box. The state and our EAS Operational area, which includes parts of
eastern California and northern Arizona, are served by more than two dozen
cable providers so it's not a matter of dealing with just one or two
companies. In some areas, the cable service is a community function, funded
through property taxes. (Some of those taxpayers are also paying a
commercial cable provider or a satellite TV subscription, as well as an
additional property tax for government-provided OTA translators.)

This problem is more than just an EAN problem. The force tune display (blue
screen of death) is limited to only what the EAS equipment can produce,
whether it's an EAN, an AMBER Alert or a weather warning. Working a "This is
a test" graphic into a once-a-year EAN test is the least of cable TV's EAS
problems. 

Local broadcasters can't even get exemptions from cable override because our
cable providers do not have equipment with that capability. Local
governments gave away their franchise authority years ago so there's no way
broadcasters, local emergency managers and the public have the ability to
pressure the cable companies to solve the problems. Working exemptions into
retransmission agreements might be a non-starter where the cable company
doesn't have the $$$ to buy a lot of new equipment. TV stations are already
getting squeezed between network fees and programming obligations. Who knows
on which side the FCC would come down on in that dispute...

The solutions would be 1--getting the cable companies to upgrade their
equipment so that local stations could ask for and receive exemptions from
force tuning; 2-- getting cable providers to replace the old set top boxes
in their system so every subscriber has a reliable way to get EAS
information when they were watching something other than the local channels;
and 3--getting cable providers to upgrade their EAS equipment to include the
complete CAP functions which would provide a text version of EAS audio
messages.

Adrienne

"Radio burps, it cries, it needs to be fed all the time, it requires
constant attention, but we love it." Jim Aaron WGLN