The FCC Public Safety Bureau and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau will host a workshop Aug. 27 on improving the use and accessibility of the emergency alert system, the FCC said in a public notice Tuesday. Attendees at the workshop will discuss methods to “empower and encourage” state and local use of EAS and Wireless Emergency Alerts for localized alerts, the PN said. The workshop will also address accessibility issues for EAS visual alerts, such as synchronicity of EAS audio with EAS visual crawls, and text-to-speech technology, the PN said. The workshop will be open to the public but will have limited seating, it said.

The FCC Media Bureau scheduled a public workshop Sept. 9 on access and use of commercial broadcast ownership data gathered through Form 323 submissions, the bureau said in a public notice Thursday. The workshop will include how to access and study the data, and mechanisms for querying and visualizing it, the PN said. Attendees should preregister and bring their own laptops, the PN said.

NAB offered to accept FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statement that duplex gap impairments would affect no more than six markets, the association said in a filing posted Monday in docket 12-268. NAB said the commission should be limited to six markets with one TV station each affected, and that none of the six should be among the top-25 markets nationwide. The FCC also shouldn't add any new TV impairments in the wireless band after the clearing target is reached, NAB said. “If a volunteering station elects to drop out of the auction and cannot be repacked in the broadcast portion of the band, the Commission must buy that station at its last accepted price.”

Some of the most “pressing work” facing the many specialist and ad hoc groups working to frame ATSC 3.0 “relates to reaching consensus on a few remaining open items” for ATSC 3.0's physical layer transmission system, ATSC President Mark Richer said in the August issue, published Monday, of ATSC’s monthly newsletter, The Standard. ATSC’s many subgroups “will be very busy in August putting the finishing touches on documenting core building blocks” of the physical layer transmission system as it heads toward ATSC 3.0 “candidate standard” status, Richer said. Work “in parallel” on ATSC 3.0's “upper layers,” including decisions about the ATSC 3.0 audio system, also continues unabated,” Richer said. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation," and Richer told us recently that work is “generally on track” toward completion (see 1507240030). “While there’s a flurry of ATSC activity focused on our aggressive short-term goals of moving various ATSC 3.0 elements” to candidate standard status this year, “we also have our eye on the horizon,” Richer said. One “exciting opportunity for many ATSC members” that the ATSC board has identified “is the desire for prototype broadcast and reception hardware” based on the ATSC 3.0 candidate standard, Richer said. “A critical mass of equipment from various manufacturers will be needed for laboratory and field testing as ATSC 3.0 moves toward Proposed Standard status in 2016. And we encourage our members to begin developing such prototypes as the suite of standards collectively known as ATSC 3.0 solidifies in the months ahead.”

Proposals connected with the incentive auction's vacant channel proceeding that would freeze the service contours of broadcasters could impair TV broadcasters' ability to take full advantage of ATSC 3.0, said a group of broadcasters in meetings last week with Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler and Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, according to an ex parte filing from pro-ATSC 3.0 group Pearl TV. Pearl's members are Cox Media, Graham Media, Hearst TV, Media General, Meredith, Raycom Media, Schurz Communications and Tegna. ATSC 3.0 development is in its final stages, is being promoted by Samsung along with Pearl and will be launched in South Korea in time for the 2016 Summer Olympics, the filing said. Under the new ATSC standard, it will be easier for broadcasters to channel share, but doing so would involve possible changes to service contours, the filing said. Proposals to prevent that would leave broadcasters with “no ability to adapt to the very different engineering and technical landscape that will exist post-repacking,” the ex parte filing said. The FCC should allow six years after the repacking to allow for broadcaster adjustments, it said. “That period will give broadcasters an opportunity to respond to the repacking process. It also will give broadcasters interested in channel sharing the confidence that they can enter the auction and be able to serve their existing audience,” Pearl said in the filing.

The FCC’s decision to fine Schurz Communications' WDBJ Roanoke, Virginia, the maximum allowable $325,000 for having "inadvertently aired a fleeting sexual image in a newscast“ is "tantamount to imposing a sentence of life imprisonment for petty theft,” said NAB and RTDNA in comments on the notice of apparent liability (see 1507010066) filed Tuesday. “The proposed sanction on WDBJ cannot be squared with relevant legal standards, common sense, or fundamental fairness,” the filing said. The “extraordinarily punitive” fine and the NAL’s focus on the content of the news story at issue -- which involved a volunteer firefighter found to have participated in online pornography -- suggest “that the Commission’s subjective view of the merit of WDBJ’s underlying news story drove the unprecedented decision here,” NAB and RTDNA said. “As such, the FCC’s action is a direct affront to First Amendment values that undoubtedly will further chill broadcast speech,” the filing said. The proposed fine is legally indefensible and should be rescinded, they said.

Video technology supplier Harmonic saw “increased Ultra HD and HEVC compression activity breaking loose” in Q2, CEO Patrick Harshman said on a Monday earnings call. During the quarter, Harmonic “passed our key milestone” by shipping the industry's first Ultra HD encoders with high dynamic range, “enabling the significantly wider color range and enhanced luminance levels that many of our customers now believe is vital to the commercial success of Ultra HD,” Harshman said. Bolstering Ultra HD adoption are growing TV sales and consumer interest, “a gradually maturing ecosystem, new test channel launches and continuous innovation in video quality and bandwidth efficiencies,” he said. There’s also “growing market interest” in HEVC compression, he said: “Many of the world's leading media and telecom companies are now actively considering leveraging HEVC to recompress existing services to dramatically expand reach and reduce distribution costs.” Harshman thinks it’s “an interesting dynamic” that more and more broadcast and media companies are “looking to use HEVC in the near term for traditional HD and even SD content as they look to drive better efficiencies in their mobile networks in their streaming infrastructure,” he said in Q&A. “We've had a couple of announced customers using HEVC technology for those services, and so we do have a view now that HEVC will be more of a near term driver even before Ultra HD really kicks out,” he said.

Consumers will suffer if the FCC eliminates its exclusivity rules, NAB said in a presentation to Chairman Tom Wheeler’s Media aide Maria Kirby Thursday, according to an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 10-71. A lack of exclusivity rules could make it harder for the FCC to enforce its coverage rules, NAB said. “Broadcasters have incorporated this geographic limitation into their contracts and, because of the rules, stations do not negotiate for coverage beyond those distances,” the filing said. “Eliminating the rule may incentivize stronger, large-market stations to seek to expand their exclusive service areas,” the filing said.

The Radio Music License Committee reached a settlement in its antitrust case with the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, said RMLC, which represents the vast majority of the nation’s commercial radio stations, in a news release Thursday. The settlement ends nearly three years of antitrust litigation between the groups, said RMLC. Under the settlement, SESAC must negotiate rates industrywide, the parties will have to undergo binding arbitration when they can’t reach a voluntary agreement, and SESAC’s current rates are frozen at their 2015 level until negotiations for the 2016-2018 term are resolved, it said. The settlement also gives SESAC more ability to license works directly to radio stations and requires SESAC to reimburse RMLC for legal fees from the antitrust case. The agreement’s “immediate impact” is that stations “will not have exposure to further SESAC rate increases and the industry now has the opportunity to obtain sustained SESAC fee relief,” RMLC said. In its release on the settlement, SESAC said it "guarantees a level playing field in establishing the fair market value of our creators’ musical works for the broadcast radio industry." The new agreement has “many benefits” for radio stations, said Wilkinson Barker radio station lawyer David Oxenford in a blog post Friday. One such benefit is that SESAC will publicize its catalog online and not take action against radio operators over SESAC music licenses unless that music has been in the online database for 45 days, he said. This will make it easier for radio operators to avoid inadvertently playing SESAC music and incurring SESAC license fees, Oxenford said. Radio stations need to have current SESAC licenses and “affirmatively opt into coverage” to benefit from the deal, Oxenford said. “RMLC is to provide each station a letter which will provide a general estimate of the fees for the current license term before the station makes the decision.”

Though ATSC President Mark Richer “can't name a specific date for the work of a subcommittee, the process to select audio technology for use in ATSC 3.0 is making great progress and is generally on track," he emailed us Friday. Under ATSC’s call for audio proposals issued in December, the S34-2 ad hoc group that’s studying ATSC 3.0 audio proposals faces an Aug. 14 deadline for delivering a recommended audio standard to its parent S34 specialist group on "applications and presentation" chaired by Madeleine Noland, an LG Electronics consultant. Dolby Labs CEO Kevin Yeaman on a Wednesday earnings call generally sidestepped questions about Dolby’s fate in the ATSC 3.0 audio selection process, though he said "we’ve been highly engaged in that process.” Dolby’s AC-4 technology is one of the proposals that the S34-2 ad hoc group is considering for adoption, along with a second proposal from the MPEG-H audio alliance of Fraunhofer, Qualcomm and Technicolor. A third proponent, DTS, dropped out of the running days before the NAB Show opened in mid-April (see 1504130030). “We have a fantastic solution that both increases efficiency and also opens up possibilities for new and enhanced audio experiences,” Yeaman said of Dolby AC-4. “We feel good about where we are at this stage in the game,” though “we’re still ways off from any broad implementation,” he said. Pressed in Q&A on when ATSC might pick an audio winner for ATSC 3.0, Yeaman said: “I don’t think we have a firm date from them.”