[EAS] National test won't be shown on AT&T U-verse?

[Adrienne Abbott]

If U-verse runs the local RMT's, remember they're getting them directly from
an LP-1 station, without the multiple "hops" of a daisy-chain-fed National
Test where a little audio gets shaved off every hop.  Their equipment will
also generate an accurate RMT crawl. 

At least U-verse gave subscribers more information than Cox gave their cable
subscribers: "A national alert has never been issued and the process for
issuing a national alert has never been tested. It is not certain that the
system will work properly at a national level."

Good luck today!

Adrienne

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

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of suzanne at mab.org

This puzzles me.  It's the tag of a story from Broadcasting & Cable about
the FCC order not to use the alert tones in news stories.  If the duration
of the test is the issue, does that suggest that U-verse can't even run RMTs
because they're "too short"? --SG
 
*****
In other EAS news, AT&T said Tuesday that since the alert was shortened last
week from 3 minutes to 30 seconds, its customers may not recieve the alert,
though they would if it were a real emergency.

"If the test only lasts 30 seconds," said AT&T, "alert messages will not be
transmitted to U-verse customers and their receivers may not be
automatically tuned to a local news station. However, in the event of an
actual emergency alert, our customers' receivers would automatically tune to
a local news station and all customers would receive the emergency alert
message."

But AT&T said it has sent out a pre-alert alert to let its viewers know
about the alert they may be missing.

"In an effort to keep our customers informed," said the company Tuesday, "we
today notified our U-verse TV customers via an on screen message that a) the
National Emergency Alert System is being tested tomorrow at 2 p.m. ET, b)
the test has been shortened by the authorities from three minutes to 30
seconds to reduce overall disruptions, and c) because of the shortened
duration of the test, the test may not appear on their TV screens."