[sbe-eas] Wrong People

[Bill.Westfall at cox.com]

>From an in the cable trenches perspective//: Now that the transition to digital is complete it is increasingly difficult for cable companies to selectively pass certain channels for reasons already indicated.


However there is an even more important reason that it might be advisable to decide to not pass broadcast channels. In our case we are located in a county in California adjacent to the LA market. While all the LA stations seem to pass the Los Angles County alerts just fine, many if not all of them do not seem to monitor all of LP1 and LP2 stations in the counties that their signals reach.  So if our local governments transmit an EAS message it may or may not be carried by the Los Angles County Stations. Since our obligation under the rules requires us to participate in our local county plan and not the plan for Los Anglers County we need to make sure that we cover local alerts, even when the local broadcast stations do not interrupt programming.


>From a broadcaster's perspective I would imagine it would be impractical for them to carry all RMT for all counties that they cover as well as the flood of alerts that might arise in individual counties during say a severe weather event. And while the broadcasters may participate in the their counties plan, I have been attending our county meetings since around 97 and have yet to see anyone from any of the major networks in the LA market.  Our compromise is that on our details page we indicate that viewers should tune to TV and radio stations for updated news since the EAS system itself does an incredibly bad job of providing specific information on it's own and needs the broadcasters to provide any useful details as to what is occurring.


Oh and I finally have something I can respond to on this list, so I thank you for the opportunity.


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