Broadcasting False or Simulated EAS Tones Can Cost Your Station Big
Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cited a station for broadcasting a skit that contained the Emergency Alert System (EAS) codes (the data burst sometime referred to as the “duck squawk”) and the two-tone attention signal. That mishap resulted in the FCC issuing a $20,000 violation against the licensee of that radio station. In fact, [...]
VVC Codec’s Potential in Broadcasting
Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the latest published video codec standard, and it has achieved the highest level of video compression to date. VVC has been drafted by a joint collaborative team of ITU-T and ISO/IEC experts known as the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which is a partnership of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts [...]
A First Look at Next Gen TV Testing
Given that the Next Gen TV platform provides broadcasters with so many new capabilities, we can anticipate that some of the more advanced broadcast services will be more complex than what is being deployed during the initial launch phase. For example, future services could include digital rights management (DRM), broadcaster applications (BA), tie-in to a [...]
Dueling Technical Emmys This Year
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) Technology and Engineering Emmy® Awards—commonly known as the "Tech Emmys"—are usually awarded in a Las Vegas ceremony during the annual NAB Show in April of each year. This year’s shift of the NAB Show to the virtual NAB Show Express due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused [...]
Tips and Tools for Remote Brainstorming
Brainstorming is one of those activities that people either love or hate. Add a pandemic and teams accustomed to generating ideas face-to-face are presented with an additional brainstorming constraint – collaborating remotely in front of a computer screen rather than together in front of a clean white board. I was curious how some of my [...]
Datacasting for Remote Learning
Given that over-the-air broadcasting continues to be the most efficient way for delivering a piece of content to many receivers (Figure 1), a potential “killer app” for broadcasters is datacasting. There are many types of services that are well-suited for datacasting, such as near video-on-demand (NVOD), targeted advertising, software download or update services. For the [...]