television | Broadcast Blog

FCC and Broadcasters Focusing on Field Enforcement

July 27, 2015 / David Layer / No Comments

Last March the FCC put forth what turned out to be a controversial plan to modernize and reduce the Commission’s field enforcement activities, resulting in significant review and comment by industry stakeholders as well as members of the U.S. Congress. In the midst of these discussions about Field Offices, the Commission in June hosted a “Pirate Radio Roundtable” focusing on strategies to combat illegal pirate radio operations. These activities recently culminated in the release of an FCC Order on reorganization of the Enforcement Bureau’s field operations and a letter from NAB to FCC Chairman Wheeler summarizing ideas from the Pirate Radio Roundtable for possible actions to combat Pirate Radio.

The FCC’s Order, released July 16, 2015, outlines several actions to realign the mission and resources of the FCC field offices and Equipment Development Group. Most notably, the Order closes completely eight of the 24 current field offices and closes an additional three offices with plans to still maintain a “local presence” in these cities (Anchorage, Kansas City, and San Juan). The table and map shown here summarize these office closure actions.

LOCATION	OFFICE TYPE	STATUS
Anchorage, AK	Resident Agent	CLOSED – LOCAL PRESENCE MAINTAINED
Atlanta, GA	District	RELOCATED NEARBY
Boston, MA	District	OPEN
Buffalo, NY	Resident Agent	CLOSED
Chicago, IL	District	OPEN
Columbia, MD	District	RELOCATED NEARBY
Dallas, TX	District	OPEN
Denver, CO	District	OPEN
Detroit, MI	District	CLOSED
Honolulu, HI	Resident Agent	OPEN
Houston, TX	Resident Agent	CLOSED
Kansas City, MO	District	CLOSED – LOCAL PRESENCE MAINTAINED
Los Angeles, CA	District	OPEN
Miami, FL	Resident Agent	OPEN
New Orleans, LA	District	OPEN
New York, NY	District	OPEN
Norfolk, VA	Resident Agent	CLOSED
Philadelphia, PA	District	CLOSED
Portland, OR	Resident Agent	OPEN
San Diego, CA	District	CLOSED
San Francisco, CA	District	RELOCATED NEARBY
San Juan, PR	Resident Agent	CLOSED – LOCAL PRESENCE MAINTAINED
Seattle, WA	District	CLOSED

More generally, the Order directs the field offices to embark on a program to update equipment and employee skillsets to address the likely issues that will accompany new and expanded uses of spectrum. The Commission wants this program to include the expanded use of remotely operated monitoring equipment to supplement field staff, as well as the identification and use of portable devices capable of assessing interference issues in bands expected to experience heavy spectrum use. The Order also stipulates that:

all Bureau field agents shall have electrical engineering backgrounds;
within six weeks of release of the Order, the Bureau will establish procedures for industry and public safety complainants to escalate their complaints within the Field organization;
the Commission will continue to work with outside stakeholders to develop a comprehensive policy and enforcement approach to the issue of unlicensed radio broadcasting;

the Commission will implement a nationwide outplacement effort to assist all displaced employees to find positions in the public or private sectors, including other vacancies within the Commission for which they are qualified and selected.

In an NAB news release on the FCC Order, NAB Executive Vice President of Communications Dennis Wharton said that “NAB appreciates the work of both the FCC and Congress in forging a compromise FCC field office proposal that keeps open many more enforcement offices than was originally proposed. We also thank both Republican and Democratic commissioners for expressing a need to better enforce prohibition against pirate radio stations. NAB looks forward to working with all stakeholders to police the airwaves against these illegal operations.”

In a separate but related matter, on July 17, 2015, NAB General Counsel and Executive Vice President Rick Kaplan sent a letter to FCC Chairman Wheeler with a list of ideas resulting from the FCC’s “Pirate Radio Roundtable” focusing on strategies to combat illegal pirate radio operations. At the Roundtable discussion it was noted that pirate radio operations erode the advertising and membership base of legitimate broadcast stations (both full- and low-power), and undermine investment in legitimate stations, particularly minority-owned stations. They also threaten the health and safety of radio listeners and local residents. Pirate radio operations disrupt the Emergency Alert System (EAS), interfere with aviation frequencies and often transmit from residential buildings where unchecked RF radiation can cause health problems.

Some of the suggestions generated at the Roundtable discussion are summarized in the NAB letter and include the following:

Significantly increase the number of enforcement actions, including Notices of Apparent Liability, Forfeitures and equipment seizures issued by the FCC against pirate operators. This effort should begin immediately as the number of pirate radio stations often increases during the summer months. While the Enforcement Bureau has issued hundreds of Notices of Unlicensed Operation, it has issued relatively few fines or equipment seizures;
Develop a Commission policy statement to share with private and law enforcement groups and help channel Commission resources towards pirate radio enforcement;
Implement a dual strategy that increases pirate enforcement effort in the short term using all existing enforcement tools while working on changes in the Communications Act and other federal laws to improve enforcement against pirate radio. This will include a legislative strategy for expanding the Commission’s authority to prosecute pirate radio operators, including coordination with the Federal Aviation Authority and the Federal Emergency Management Agency;
Raise the awareness of entities (e.g., concert venues, building owners and managers, advertisers) that may unknowingly aid and abet pirate radio operators. Develop best practices with representative trade associations and organizations;
Enlist law enforcement entities that can serve as partners in education efforts;
Enhance the Commission’s ability to identify and prosecute pirate operators, including the continued assistance of broadcasters in locating illegal radio transmitters and studios;
Further examine the impact of pirate radio on the nation’s EAS system;
Create a permanent liaison between the Commission, U.S. Attorney’s Offices, US Marshal’s service, and state and local law enforcement agencies to facilitate pirate radio enforcement;
Explore using private sector engineers to help FCC offices work with local law enforcement in a more efficient manner.

Media Monitoring with Big Data: Opportunities and Challenges

June 29, 2015 / Tariq Islam / No Comments

What would marketing strategists do if every second of all broadcast television, broadcast radio, and social media posts were available in real time for analysis? How would advertisers react if the transcripts of all the TV and radio broadcast information were available in addition to video and audio for every second anywhere in the nation in real time? Big Data analytics provides a means to digest this copious amount of information and to make ad buying decisions on the fly.

Big Data analytics means not only processing very large amounts of data but also attempting to coherently connect the unstructured nature of the data. For example, the data could be a combination of radio and TV transmissions converted into speech by a speech coder, closed caption text of TV programs, Twitter and Facebook posts, financial data and spreadsheets, and news articles. Another advantage of Big Data analytics is that the system is self-learning; once the initial analytical model has been created, additional new data and information can be easily integrated into the knowledge base. Big Data analytics has been creating a buzz in the industry for a number of years, and many companies are already offering tools and services to reap the benefits.

An example of a company that archives broadcast content for media monitoring is Critical Mention. Critical Mention captures and indexes 40 hours of broadcast content every 60 seconds from more than 2,000 unique broadcast sources. The users thus have access to a database of more than 16 million searchable segments, all available in broadcast quality and near-real time. The users can search TV/radio/online news, watch video, edit and share coverage, receive real-time alerts, and create reports. The system also offers analytic tools to gain insight into the data, to benchmark against competitors, to analyze viewer sentiment, and to visualize density of coverage on maps. The following picture is an example of the analysis tool output.

Figure: Critical Mention Analytics

Integration of Big Data analytics with archived media information would open up many new possibilities in the future. For example, the single string-based search provided by Critical Mention can be augmented to perform searches based on different combinations of groups of words. Grouping of related words and inclusion/exclusion combinations of many different groups are known as dictionaries and rules in Big Data jargon, and these well known techniques are used to isolate relevant information and validate hypotheses. The natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of big data can also help make inference about the context in which the key words are used, making the results more reliable and relevant. Yet one can envision that image processing and pattern matching algorithms could be used to detect and quantify product placement in broadcast video. For example, the Coke logo can be identified in time-stamped video frames across all the broadcasters of all the DMAs in real time. These capabilities are computationally intensive, but the algorithms are fairly well understood. Cloud services, which offer scalable computational resources, can make this kind of analysis available in the future.

Recognizing some of these potential business opportunities, broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers are developing a next-generation television system with dynamic ad insertion and targeted advertising capabilities. If ad buyers can identify a need – in real-time if they wish – to maintain their brands’ share of voice (SOV) in certain geographically segmented markets, broadcasters will have the technical means to deliver the ads to the intended audience in the future. As a consequence, programmatic advertising and ad exchange might become more dynamic in terms of balancing demand and supply.

This kind of individualized targeting might also raise challenges to traditional advertising models in the broadcast industry. With access to all the real-time and personalized information of the audience, an ad buyer will have the option to use different means to reach the audience, even when the audience is consuming broadcast content. For example, armed with the knowledge of a consumer’s state of mind at a certain location at a certain instant, the ad buyer might reach the targeted customer through a smartphone, thus totally bypassing the broadcasters. Proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) will provide more outlets for targeted advertising, and the situation might become even more challenging for the traditional broadcasting model.

Media monitoring along with Big Data analytics has tremendous potential for targeted and contextual advertising. The advertising industry is changing rapidly, revealing both opportunities and challenges for broadcasters. Broadcasters will need to be vigilant of this fundamental paradigm shift in advertising and adapt to new market challenges.

First HDR/WCG Television Ecosystem Established

May 4, 2015 / Skip Pizzi / No Comments

At the 2015 NAB Show, Dolby Laboratories announced that it had established the first video high dynamic range and wide color gamut television ecosystem, combining content creators with a content distributor and TV display manufacturer, all deployed around its proprietary video format called Dolby Vision.

The Ultra High-Definition (UHD) video space continues to develop its extensions beyond HDTV, along the multiple axes of greater spatial definition, higher luminance dynamic range (HDR), wider color gamut (WCG), and higher frame rate (HFR). Numerous proposals have been put forward in this environment by a number of organizations, and standards are under development in various SDOs, including ATSC (as part of the ATSC 3.0 next-generation TV standard) and SMPTE. To date, however, there have been no comprehensive decisions made on precisely what constitutes a complete UHDTV delivery format. The only real agreement to date has been on spatial resolution for first-generation UHD, at 3840 x 2160 pixels (“4K”).

Although a participant in these standardization processes, Dolby has simultaneously put forward its proprietary format, albeit in a limited manner, via the over-the-top (OTT) Internet TV environment. The partners in the ecosystem to date include Warner Bros. (which has developed a few items of feature-film content in the format), Walmart’s VUDU OTT service, and TV manufacturer Vizio. At the initial announcement on April 13, 2015, Vizio planned to offer Dolby Vision support on both HD and 4K televisions of up to 120 inch display size, although availability dates and prices have not yet been specified.

There have been hints that this initial consortium of players may expand, but even in its currently limited arrangement, the Dolby announcement is a shot across the bow to the standards development players, indicating that proprietary, end-to-end alliances are possible in the UHD space. This implies that if true de jure standards are not developed soon, there is risk that a number of de facto“standards” could emerge and dilute any effort for a singular industry format to attain critical mass around HDR and/or WCG. Thus even such a limited grouping as the current Dolby Vision initiative puts pressure on broader standards initiatives to accelerate their activities. Meanwhile, the process also may generate valuable learning for SDOs as to what elements of UHD appeal most strongly to consumers.

(Incidentally, in an attempt to avoid divergence and possible balkanization among UHD formats, two industry groups recently have been formed—the UHD Alliance and the UHD Forum. The former allies content creators with display manufacturers for the proper and uniform realization of producers’ intent, while the latter and more nascent group intends to coalesce common practices for distribution and transmission of UHD content.)

Technically, the Dolby Vision approach sets a dynamic range that extends the maximum luminance capability of the HDR display from its current level of 100 candela per square meter (cd/m², generally referred to as “nits”) in television to 10,000 nits. (The latter extreme is expected to be used only for adding small highlights, while more typical bright picture elements might range around 1,000 nits.) Dolby cites subjective testing of viewers that it conducted in determining this range (see figure below), and although the current Vizio displays only reach 800 nits, the resulting images are noticeably improved to most viewers when compared with standard luminance displays. This had led many industry observers to the belief that HDR and WCG (and perhaps also HFR) may be more important than spatial resolution (4K) alone for broad adoption of UHDTV.

Summary of Dolby’s subjective viewer tests, showing preferences of luminance dynamic range for dark, light and highlight image elements (dotted line curves), with comparison to the dynamic range capabilities of various existing display technologies. (EDR = Extended Dynamic Range) (Courtesy Dolby Labs)

The Dolby Vision format also includes an adaptation of WCG tailored to its extended luminance range. Rather than simply adapting current practice in the electro-optical transfer function (EOTF), Dolby proposes a perceptually based quantization method (PQ), allowing what might require up to 15 bits for each video sample to be reduced to 12 bits, and still deliver perceptually effective HDR and WCG images.

Another key issue is backward compatibility. For example, given that new TV screens are required to display HDR content (even at HD resolutions), will the same content display properly on standard dynamic range (SDR) screens, or will two discrete versions of the content be required? Naturally, it would be preferred if a single content format could be developed that provides HDR quality to HDR-capable displays but still renders acceptable pictures to SDR displays, similar to how HD content is handled by SD displays today. Experts have noted, however, that such HDR-to-SDR compatibility and the management of multiple color spaces are more challenging than simply rescaling spatial resolution across multiple display types. Said another way, HDR and WCG are about the quality of pixels, not the quantity of them.

Although obviously quite active in the UHD space, Dolby is not alone, with substantial effort and prototype formats or hardware also being developed by Sony, Samsung, Technicolor, LG and others. And while not as mature as development in the spatial resolution area, it has become generally acknowledged that HDR and WCG (and possibly HFR) are important elements that should be included in any initial UHDTV delivery standard. Developers in these areas are therefore under pressure to bring their work to a point at which it can be considered for standardization, so developments like the Dolby Vision announcement can have significant impact upon the progress of next-generation TV standards like ATSC 3.0.