[EAS] FCC Seeks Comment on Multilingual EAS

[Kenyon, Alfred]

Kevin said:  "Are there any long range plans to go all-digital with IPAWS/CAP/EAS? Much like the DTV transition has changed TV, why not do an all D-EAS transition? Dream with me... with D-EAS adding another PID (or two, or three, or 65,535) to a stream is not that big of a deal. A D-EAS decoder could be user-selectable to whatever language the user wants"

Well Kevin, part of that is already in place. The IPAWS CAP Profile allows for alert originators to include several language versions of a single alert in a CAP message and one or more EAS device manufacturers produce devices that can examine the CAP message and retrieve say, a Spanish version message and send it to a Spanish TTS engine or selectively download and play a Spanish language message audio file. IPAWS is not limited to just English and Spanish. I suppose the main limitation is the available character set.

Al Kenyon