Leading Local Insights
Leading Local Insights
Enhancing Public Safety: The Evolution and Impact of Datacasting
Did you know that broadcast datacasting, which started with closed captioning, now plays a vital role in public safety and emergency communications? SpectraRep, an affiliate of BIA, has pioneered datacasting and is developing a nationwide wireless network for public safety, emergency management, remote learning, and more.
In this podcast, SpectraRep’s COO, John McCoskey, and CTO, George Molnar, discuss how datacasting has evolved from analog to digital, and now reaches over 200 million people in the U.S. They share how it supports first responders, enhances emergency management, and improves earthquake early warning systems on the West Coast, delivering lifesaving alerts in seconds. By utilizing both ATSC-1 and ATSC-3 technologies, datacasting provides a reliable solution for significant communication challenges.
Listen now to see how broadcasters are stepping up the opportunity to help protect and secure their local communities. For questions or to connect with the SpectraRep team, please contact info@SpectraRep.com and visit www.spectrarep.com.
Hi, this is the BIA Leading Local Insights Podcast. I'm John McCoskey, Chief Operating Officer at SpectraRep, and I'm joined by a new addition to the SpectraRep team, George Molnar, who's our new Chief Technology Officer. Welcome, George.
John McCoskey:wereg were going to give you and update on datacasting. Somehitng near and dear to our heart and our business. Hopefully you'll learn something from this podcast. G
John McCoskey:But things really got interesting for data casting at the time of the digital TV transition about two decades ago, and that opened up capacity for data services because it was then a digital pathway. It really made it easy to integrate IP-based digital services into data casting and candidly early on, data casting was largely a solution, a technology solution that was looking for use cases to solve and I would say our success in this space has been identifying problems that can be solved well by data casting and by building relationships with broadcast partners and the users with that problem to solve. And we found several problems to solve and we'll talk about those a little later in this podcast, but in fact we currently reach over 200 million people in the US with data casting services today.
George Molnar:Wow, it's a lot of people. It's probably close to 90% or maybe more of the population.
John McCoskey:How do? You reach that many people. Yeah, it really goes back to broadcast partnerships. So we partner with individual television stations, in some cases with public stations that operate state networks, and our footprint today is about 130 full-power transmitters and several hundred more translators that serve rural communities, largely in the Mountain West.
George Molnar:Interesting. So that's both an ATSC-1 and the new next-gen ATSC-3,. Is that right?
John McCoskey:Absolutely so. There's a misconception that a lot of people have that you need ATSC-3 or next-gen TV to effectively offer data casting services. Yeah, that's definitely not the case. The majority of those transmitters that I just mentioned for us are still ATSC1 stations. We're seeing stations start to convert to ATSC3, but the lion's share of our capacity is still on ATSC1 stations. And don't get me wrong, we love ATSC3. The advantages it offers for data casting are fabulous. Every bit of gear that we ship today for the station side as well as for end users, is ATSC1 and ATSC3 capable. We're very conscious about not stranding end users or slowing the transition for broadcasters, and the real advantages that we see of ATSC3 are more data capacity, the ability to hit mobile receivers and moving receivers and the ability to optimize transmission performance for particular use cases, because some use cases really do like a more robust transmission capability.
George Molnar:Gotcha. So question for you you have all this data going out via the data casting pipe. Where is it going to? Who's using it?
John McCoskey:So we have three primary use cases that have developed for us over the past 20 years or so. The longest term one is what I would call emergency management and public safety communications. So this is communications supporting first responders, emergency managers, police, fire, National Guard organizations like that that are always challenged with communications issues, particularly when they're working around natural disasters and events that consume their time. So that's one area. The second one is more recent.
John McCoskey:During COVID, we found an opportunity to serve or solve a problem that was really much bigger than anybody anticipated, and this was the lack of broadband access to kids that were now forced into a remote learning or home learning situation, and data casting turned out to be a really good mechanism for delivering content into the homes of those families without internet access or without sufficient internet access, and so that was a use case that evolved and has continued even post-COVID. And the third area that we've really been able to identify and build against is public alerting. So this is not so much for first responders and emergency managers. This is actual alerting to people of things that are going on in their communities and that could be earthquakes, tsunamis, flash flood and any of the kinds of things that the public needs to be alerted about.
George Molnar:Excellent. Now, public alert and warning is very close to my heart. It's one of those things that I really enjoy. We have wireless emergency alerts, noaa weather radio, the emergency alert system. Is this part of the EAS, is this part of one of those other programs, or is it a new all-hazards kind of technology?
John McCoskey:It's a new pathway, I'll say so. You know there are existing alerting pathways, some of them you know. The NOAA Weather Radio that you mentioned goes back 70 years. It's an analog AM radio-based system but it still works and people use it and it alerts people. Wea to cell phones is a newer technology that works very well. People carry their phones, they get alerts on their phones, but we are subject to last mile delivery issues. You know cell networks get congested. When the power goes out in a storm or a flood, cell networks go down. So this is another pathway, not to replace any of those other pathways but just to provide an independent route with very few overlapping systems that are used to deliver those alerts to consumers.
George Molnar:Interesting. I understand on the West Coast you're involved with the earthquake early warning. Is that something that data casting has found a niche for?
John McCoskey:Yeah, that's really the initiative that got us thinking about alerts using data casting. So earthquakes are a particularly difficult alert to deliver because they are very sensitive to time. You know when an earthquake alert is issued the event has already started and if you can't get the alert out to people that are going to be affected very quickly and I say very quickly, seconds it really is not a useful alert. If the event has happened, the shaking has passed them by. So earthquakes were identified as a really good use case for alerting, for data casting. Because it's broadcast, you send it once, doesn't matter whether you have one receiver or a million receivers, everybody gets it at the same time. It's very efficient, very fast. And when I say fast, there are 11 public television stations that we partner with in California and they deliver these earthquake early warning alerts from the US Geological Survey and a system called ShakeAlert in less than a second. So if an alert happens it gets distributed quickly to these 11 stations broadcast over the entire state, reaching a population of about 35 million residents, and those alerts are geotargeted. They have a polygon on a map and if you're outside that polygon it's not going to bother you with an alert. If you're inside the polygon. You're likely to be affected, and so alert receivers will go off and tell you very quickly. You know an event has happened, You're going to be affected. Stop, drop and take cover. An event has happened, you're going to be affected, stop, drop and take cover.
John McCoskey:So that was really the first uh alerting system that we did with data casting. The good news is, as I said, that's the hardest one. Uh alerts for things like uh wildfire and tornado and tsunami. Time matters, but not seconds, so we can use that same technology and deliver any kind of alert From FEMA IPAWS, which is the National Alert Aggregator. These are the things that you often get as a weird alert on your phone, so it might be a traffic situation or weather or, you know, Amber Alert, those kind of things. All of those can be distributed through data casting alerting as well.
George Molnar:So this is another channel on the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System from FEMA. It's not just a standalone process.
John McCoskey:Yeah, so we actually tie into the national FEMA IPAWS feed, which is really the same thing that WEA uses to get to the cell operators, and anything that comes across. That feed then we can distribute and, like the earthquakes, those alerts have a polygon on a map that says this is the affected area and so we'll only alert you know a receiver if it is actually in the affected area. The receivers know where they are.
George Molnar:Excellent. So how can broadcasters get involved? Is it a complicated process, or is it something that a broadcaster can easily add to their production equipment?
John McCoskey:Yeah, great, great question. So this is building on top of the existing broadcast infrastructure. So this is not climbing towers, this is not adding gear. You know that's difficult to add. We generally tell our broadcast partners this is about, you know, two hours of an engineer's time to install a couple of units in a rack in the station, and once they do that, the broadcaster is really a distribution partner. It's hands-off for them. They're not worrying about issuing alerts or tying into schools for educational content or first responders. They're really just a transmission pipe and we manage all of that remotely from the back end. So set it and forget. It is what we like to say Great.
George Molnar:Now, can more than one broadcaster do it in a market? Is there space for that kind of transmission capability?
John McCoskey:Absolutely so. Back to California, as an example, for earthquake alerts, you want to have as many pathways as you can, so in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example, there are two stations in each of those markets that are both completely overlapped in signal but sending the same alert messages, and that's just to maximize the probability of alerts getting through. Another example is Washington DC. We're on the air here with three stations, that's we're based in the Washington DC. We're on the air here with three stations, that's we're based in the Washington DC area, and that's largely because we need capacity. Our primary user in the district is public safety and they like to use this for sharing live streaming videos from drones and tactical cameras and things like that. So those three stations give us more capacity in the market than we could get with just one station.
George Molnar:Incredible, so does it cost a lot of money? I guess that's the question that everybody's got on their mind what's in it for me and how much does it cost?
John McCoskey:Yeah, so the station gear, as I said, is a couple of boxes, so it's a pretty low lift on the station side. And generally the way our business models work is we do a revenue share, so we're bringing you know a service that Spectre provides, the transmission infrastructure and capacity that the broadcast partner provides, and the end user that ultimately is solving a problem and willing to pay for a service to solve that problem. So they tend to be revenue shares and they vary from a straight revenue share between the broadcaster and Spectrep or sometimes, if we are putting in the equipment on spec, sometimes we'll recover the cost of the equipment off the front end and then do a revenue share after that. So it's something that basically is a revenue share model. The key is this is a new revenue stream. So stations know that they have multiple revenue streams that are under stress these days. So this adds a new revenue stream potential for stations and that's why we think it's interesting to broadcasters.
George Molnar:Excellent. So, John, I think we're about out of time, but I just wanted to say to our listeners if you need more information, please contact us via email at info@SpectrRep... SpectraRep. com you want to be part of our network, we'd just be delighted to hear from you, and if you have any further questions. Likewise, John McCoskey, thanks very much for your time. Really appreciate you being on the podcast. I'm George Molnar for Spectra SpectraRep Thank you, Thanks everybody.