Unanimous Vote Expected for Multilingual EAS NPRM
An FCC draft NPRM seeking comment on using scripted templates to facilitate multilingual emergency alert system messages is expected to change little from the original draft and be approved unanimously, agency officials told us. By eliminating the difficulty of translating the messages, “this model potentially should make issuing multilingual EAS alerts simpler and more accessible for alert originators,” the draft said. Many proposals in the draft item could severely burden MVPDs and broadcasters, according to NCTA and alerting industry officials. The item is on the agenda for the commissioners' open meeting on Thursday.
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The draft NPRM seeks comment on using prerecorded audio and pre-translated messages to deliver alerts in English and the 13 most commonly spoken non-English languages in the U.S.: Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, French, Korean, Russian, Haitian Creole, German, Hindi, Portuguese and Italian. It also separately asks about delivering the alerts in American Sign Language.
Alert originators can issue EAS messages in any language or combination of languages, but preliminary results from the 2023 nationwide EAS test show that few are doing so, the FCC said. Preliminary findings show “approximately 2% of EAS participants reported transmitting the alert in Spanish” while “an additional 0.1% of alerts were reportedly transmitted in other languages including Chinese,” said the draft NPRM.
The commission would produce the proposed translated templates and audio “and would be pre-installed in the EAS equipment operated by EAS Participants,” said a fact sheet released with the draft item. It also asks about requiring EAS participants to deliver the translated alerts in the language of the participant’s programming content. Under such a policy, if a participant has multiple channels, the alert on each channel would correspond to that channel’s language, the draft item said. The item also seeks comment on the costs and technical aspects of accomplishing this, such as whether the capability could be delivered to EAS devices via “a routine software update patch.”
EAS officials and MVPDs say proposals in the NPRM would be difficult to implement. The FCC has previously noted that many smaller broadcasters appear to have difficulty keeping up with required updates to their EAS equipment, said Ed Czarnecki, Digital Alert Systems vice president-global and government affairs. It’s also not clear what the data requirements for all those templates and audio files might be, Czarnecki said. He expects the NPRM to draw a great deal of pushback when comments are due.
The alerting community features a fairly small group of stakeholders, and multilingual alerting would likely be better handled by a public/private task force than an NPRM, Czarnecki said. The industry has had a long time to work on such a task force; the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council has pushed for multilingual alerts for 19 years. In a 2018 U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision siding with the FCC against MMTC, a pre-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh chided the agency for operating on “bureaucracy standard time” on this item. In a 2019 FCC workshop on multilingual alerting, representatives of industry trade groups CTIA, NAB and NCTA spoke against proposals requiring multilingual alerts (see 1906280054. MMTC didn't comment Tuesday.
NCTA and several cable companies were also critical of the NPRM’s proposals in an ex parte filing last week. “The Draft NPRM does not accurately reflect the enormous technical and logistical challenges that its proposals would present for cable operators,” NCTA, Charter, Comcast and Cox said. “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,” the filing said. The MVPDs called for additional questions to be added to the NPRM on the feasibility of the proposal for cable.