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Enhancing Public Safety: The Evolution and Impact of Datacasting · Leading Local Insights

• 0:34
  John McCoskey: Hi, this is the BIA Leading Local Insights Podcast.
• 0:37
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 0:45
  John McCoskey: Welcome, George.
• 1:06
  John McCoskey: wereg were going to give you and update on datacasting.
• 1:06
  John McCoskey: Somehitng near and dear to our heart and our business.
• 1:06
  John McCoskey: Hopefully you'll learn something from this podcast.
• 1:06
  John McCoskey: G
• 1:34
  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.
• 1:46
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 2:12
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 2:25
  George Molnar: Wow, it's a lot of people.
• 2:26
  George Molnar: It's probably close to 90% or maybe more of the population.
• 2:35
  John McCoskey: How do?
• 2:35
  John McCoskey: You reach that many people.
• 2:36
  John McCoskey: Yeah, it really goes back to broadcast partnerships.
• 2:37
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 2:56
  George Molnar: Interesting.
• 2:56
  George Molnar: So that's both an ATSC-1 and the new next-gen ATSC-3,.
• 3:01
  George Molnar: Is that right?
• 3:02
  John McCoskey: Absolutely so.
• 3:03
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 3:11
  John McCoskey: Yeah, that's definitely not the case.
• 3:13
  John McCoskey: The majority of those transmitters that I just mentioned for us are still ATSC1 stations.
• 3:18
  John McCoskey: We're seeing stations start to convert to ATSC3, but the lion's share of our capacity is still on ATSC1 stations.
• 3:25
  John McCoskey: And don't get me wrong, we love ATSC3.
• 3:28
  John McCoskey: The advantages it offers for data casting are fabulous.
• 3:32
  John McCoskey: Every bit of gear that we ship today for the station side as well as for end users, is ATSC1 and ATSC3 capable.
• 3:40
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 4:06
  George Molnar: Gotcha.
• 4:07
  George Molnar: So question for you you have all this data going out via the data casting pipe.
• 4:13
  George Molnar: Where is it going to?
• 4:14
  George Molnar: Who's using it?
• 4:16
  John McCoskey: So we have three primary use cases that have developed for us over the past 20 years or so.
• 4:24
  John McCoskey: The longest term one is what I would call emergency management and public safety communications.
• 4:30
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 4:52
  John McCoskey: So that's one area.
• 4:53
  John McCoskey: The second one is more recent.
• 4:56
  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.
• 5:29
  John McCoskey: And the third area that we've really been able to identify and build against is public alerting.
• 5:37
  John McCoskey: So this is not so much for first responders and emergency managers.
• 5:41
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 5:54
  George Molnar: Excellent.
• 5:55
  George Molnar: Now, public alert and warning is very close to my heart.
• 5:57
  George Molnar: It's one of those things that I really enjoy.
• 5:59
  George Molnar: We have wireless emergency alerts, noaa weather radio, the emergency alert system.
• 6:04
  George Molnar: 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?
• 6:14
  John McCoskey: It's a new pathway, I'll say so.
• 6:16
  John McCoskey: You know there are existing alerting pathways, some of them you know.
• 6:21
  John McCoskey: The NOAA Weather Radio that you mentioned goes back 70 years.
• 6:24
  John McCoskey: It's an analog AM radio-based system but it still works and people use it and it alerts people.
• 6:29
  John McCoskey: Wea to cell phones is a newer technology that works very well.
• 6:34
  John McCoskey: People carry their phones, they get alerts on their phones, but we are subject to last mile delivery issues.
• 6:42
  John McCoskey: You know cell networks get congested.
• 6:44
  John McCoskey: When the power goes out in a storm or a flood, cell networks go down.
• 6:49
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 7:03
  George Molnar: Interesting.
• 7:04
  George Molnar: I understand on the West Coast you're involved with the earthquake early warning.
• 7:08
  George Molnar: Is that something that data casting has found a niche for?
• 7:11
  John McCoskey: Yeah, that's really the initiative that got us thinking about alerts using data casting.
• 7:19
  John McCoskey: So earthquakes are a particularly difficult alert to deliver because they are very sensitive to time.
• 7:28
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 7:43
  John McCoskey: If the event has happened, the shaking has passed them by.
• 7:47
  John McCoskey: So earthquakes were identified as a really good use case for alerting, for data casting.
• 7:53
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 8:02
  John McCoskey: It's very efficient, very fast.
• 8:04
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 8:19
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 8:33
  John McCoskey: They have a polygon on a map and if you're outside that polygon it's not going to bother you with an alert.
• 8:39
  John McCoskey: If you're inside the polygon.
• 8:41
  John McCoskey: You're likely to be affected, and so alert receivers will go off and tell you very quickly.
• 8:45
  John McCoskey: You know an event has happened, You're going to be affected.
• 8:48
  John McCoskey: Stop, drop and take cover.
• 8:50
  John McCoskey: An event has happened, you're going to be affected, stop, drop and take cover.
• 8:53
  John McCoskey: So that was really the first uh alerting system that we did with data casting.
• 8:56
  John McCoskey: The good news is, as I said, that's the hardest one.
• 8:59
  John McCoskey: Uh alerts for things like uh wildfire and tornado and tsunami.
• 9:03
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 9:16
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 9:25
  John McCoskey: All of those can be distributed through data casting alerting as well.
• 9:30
  George Molnar: So this is another channel on the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System from FEMA.
• 9:34
  George Molnar: It's not just a standalone process.
• 9:38
  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.
• 9:50
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 10:05
  John McCoskey: The receivers know where they are.
• 10:07
  George Molnar: Excellent.
• 10:07
  George Molnar: So how can broadcasters get involved?
• 10:09
  George Molnar: Is it a complicated process, or is it something that a broadcaster can easily add to their production equipment?
• 10:16
  John McCoskey: Yeah, great, great question.
• 10:17
  John McCoskey: So this is building on top of the existing broadcast infrastructure.
• 10:22
  John McCoskey: So this is not climbing towers, this is not adding gear.
• 10:25
  John McCoskey: You know that's difficult to add.
• 10:26
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 10:42
  John McCoskey: It's hands-off for them.
• 10:43
  John McCoskey: They're not worrying about issuing alerts or tying into schools for educational content or first responders.
• 10:50
  John McCoskey: They're really just a transmission pipe and we manage all of that remotely from the back end.
• 10:55
  John McCoskey: So set it and forget.
• 10:57
  John McCoskey: It is what we like to say Great.
• 10:59
  George Molnar: Now, can more than one broadcaster do it in a market?
• 11:02
  George Molnar: Is there space for that kind of transmission capability?
• 11:07
  John McCoskey: Absolutely so.
• 11:08
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 11:30
  John McCoskey: Another example is Washington DC.
• 11:32
  John McCoskey: We're on the air here with three stations, that's we're based in the Washington DC.
• 11:35
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 11:41
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 11:54
  John McCoskey: So those three stations give us more capacity in the market than we could get with just one station.
• 12:01
  George Molnar: Incredible, so does it cost a lot of money?
• 12:03
  George Molnar: 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?
• 12:09
  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.
• 12:15
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 12:39
  John McCoskey: 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.
• 12:59
  John McCoskey: So it's something that basically is a revenue share model.
• 13:03
  John McCoskey: The key is this is a new revenue stream.
• 13:05
  John McCoskey: So stations know that they have multiple revenue streams that are under stress these days.
• 13:12
  John McCoskey: So this adds a new revenue stream potential for stations and that's why we think it's interesting to broadcasters.
• 13:19
  George Molnar: Excellent.
• 13:19
  George Molnar: 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.
• 13:28
  George Molnar: .
• 13:28
  George Molnar: .
• 13:29
  George Molnar: SpectraRep.
• 13:30
  George Molnar: 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.
• 13:35
  George Molnar: Likewise, John McCoskey, thanks very much for your time.
• 13:38
  George Molnar: Really appreciate you being on the podcast.
• 13:40
  George Molnar: I'm George Molnar for Spectra SpectraRep Thank you, Thanks everybody.