[EAS] The best public alerting quality experience

[Sean Donelan]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2016, Kenyon, Alfred wrote:
> There were many, many stations with clean, clear scoll and audio 
> presentations.

I agree many stations had a clean test.  I only heard/saw one major 
problem on the dozen or so Washington, DC stations I was able to 
quickly flip through during the test. I'd rate most as - met expectation.

In my letter, I'd like to include some example stations which exceeded 
expectation.

The WPTZ-TV background graphic is a nice animation, which thanks to 
this list I've learned was used by all Hearst stations, but not the only
reason why I think it exceeded expectations. The important information, 
the text crawl also exceeded expectations. The Hearst TV crawl had 
readable pacing, contrast, and font.

My compliments to the Hearst TV graphics team for a job well done.

EAS crawls sometimes have a weird fuzziness or stuttering on HDTV 
(upconversion?). Different participants scroll horizontally, vertically 
or page flips. If it was an actual emergency, the EAS text information 
shouldn't be in the used car dealer disclaimer font with super-fast crawl 
speed.

> Here's a topic for further comment:
>
> Many TV stations simply duck the main program audio by a few dB during 
> playback of EAS audio. While this may be acceptable for local alerts I 
> question if this would be appropriate in the case of an actual 
> Presidential EAS alert. If we should ever come to that point as a nation 
> effectively arranging it so that the President is in a shouting contest 
> with the testimony of Divorce Court would not be appropriate. Since 
> processing of NPT is supposed to emulate the behavior of an EAN that is 
> the current situation.

I didn't notice ducking with this NPT, but I have noticed cross-talk on 
DTV stations with RMTs. I'm not sure if the program audio is ducking or 
the equipment is only replacing the center (or L/R) audio channel with 
the alert audio and the other 5.1 channels still have the original 
program audio. But I haven't analyzed the transport streams.

A published concept of operations would be useful.