In a letter to the FCC, NCTA – The Internet & Television Association told the agency that recent efforts to expand the number of non-English languages used in emergency alerts will produce technical and logistical challenges for cable operators. “The Draft NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] does not accurately reflect the enormous technical and logistical challenges that its proposals would present for cable operators," the NCTA said.
In January the FCC announced that it would vote in February on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks to remove technical and logistical barriers associated with the translation of EAS alerts by creating templates or pre-scripted alert messages that have been pre-translated into non-English languages and prerecorded audio files. These messages can then be initiated by alert originators for distribution to the public by the TV and radio broadcasters, cable service providers, and other “EAS Participant” services that make up the EAS public alert distribution system.
The NCTA letter noted that members of its group from Charter, Comcast and Cox met with FCC staffers on Feb. 8 and 9 to express their concerns about the proposal.
During the meetings, the “NCTA detailed that cable operators’ EAS and video architecture cannot currently support delivery of a variety of non-English language template alerts corresponding to the language of the program channel,” a letter to the FCC from NCTA dated Feb. 9 stated. “Any solution to enable such multilingual alerting on cable systems would require
much more than a simple software update to EAS equipment; rather, it would require significant, years-long efforts from industry and standards groups and substantial changes to the cable video architecture.”
In the letter, NCTA urged “the Commission to include additional questions in the NPRM to address these complexities and help develop a full record on the feasibility of the proposals for cable operators. Specifically, we asked to include the following questions in the NPRM:"
- "In paragraph 16: We seek comment on whether EAS Participants that carry multiple channels have the ability to determine what language is being used on a particular channel at any given time. Do cable operators assign language descriptors to the programming they carry? For cable systems, can customer premises equipment indicate to EAS encoder/decoders the language in which an alert should be delivered to each customer?
- "In paragraph 16: How would the template model work for cable systems that force tune to deliver alerts, particularly in cases where the cable operator may carry channels in over 10-15 different languages?
- "In paragraph 30: We seek comment on whether, for EAS Participants that carry multiple channels, there is a risk that the language template corresponding to program content will conflict with individual customers’ language preferences, or, alternatively, that individual device settings will not match the language assigned to each channel.”
The full letter can be found here.
