[EAS] EAS on Internet Streams

[Allen Sherrill]

Many of my stations have a delay unit; some of my stations stay in delay nearly 100% of the time.  The delay unit is normally upstream of the EAS box.

Because of the silly-ass talent fees imposed on us by AFTRA and whoever else is involved, we go to great lengths to make sure hardly any commercial matter that might possibly involve AFTRA talent makes it onto the stream audio.  The equipment that inserts substitute audio on our streams relies on consistent timing of programming elements.

Having a delay unit in place, that might be ramping up or down at various times, will totally screw up the timing and make the stream sound stupid.  So we made the conscious decision to feed our streams with pre-delay audio.  In practice that means that our streams are pre-EAS audio as well.

I agree that there may be some useful purpose in having EAS alerts on the stream, although most of our stations repeat the alert information during regular programming anyway.  I personally do not think it is wise to put EAS equipment in front of a delay, because I believe that the delay could render the tones invalid under certain conditions.

So as a practical matter, our streams do not contain EAS alerts.  I realize it would be possible to rig up an insertion device to dump alert audio onto each stream during an EAS alert.  One of these days I might actually get around to building one.

Allen Sherrill