[EAS] Cable TV Problems

[Alan Kline]

Hear, hear! For one thing, the "force tuning" concept is a little too 
"Big Brother" for my taste. For another, we've invested literally 
millions in our news and weather operations in order to be the place 
where viewers turn in an emergency. It's both good public service and 
good business. Having a cable system force-tune our viewers away to a 
channel of their choice is counterproductive, both for us and our audience.

During the National test, our local system force-tuned our audience to a 
slate that simply said "This is a national activation of the Emergency 
Alert System". That's it. No "TEST" graphic, no audio, no nothing. 
Completely useless. Then 3 minutes later, when our DASDEC relayed the 
test, we had a proper "TEST" graphic with the audio (such as it was). 
The cable system force-tuning our viewers was both superfluous and 
confusing to our viewers. The cable graphic did nothing to inform the 
viewers of the true nature of what was happening, and if the DASDEC had 
fired simultaneously, our viewers would have had no idea what was 
happening. (If, of course, they had missed the zillion PSA's and news 
stories that preceded the test...)

For Cartoon Network or local access channels or whatever, fine. But 
leave us alone to do our job.

Alan

On 11/28/2011 1:46 PM, David Ostmo wrote:
> One additional note, from the broadcast TV side we would prefer to have our channels excluded from forced channel tune, even if it is a national activation.
>
> David Ostmo
> San Antonio, Texas