DATACASTING FOR PUBLIC SAFETY IN OHIO Presentation to members of the Statewide Interoperable Executive Committee January 23, 2019, with notes revised February, 2019 Dave Carwile Project Manager of the Ohio Digital EAS Project (OEAS) Administrator/Ohio Educational Television Stations Inc. Senior Director/WOSU Public Media [email protected] 1 Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m Dave Carwile, here on behalf of the Ohio Educational Television Stations group in my role as Project Manager of OEAS. Thank you for a chance to talk about a first‐of‐its‐kind statewide emergency communications initiative in Ohio that, at least in part, has become a model for other states while influencing the planning for a new nationwide system. Since this technology has been featured in various public safety publications in recent months, I’m going to extend my comments more than a bit into how this technology is also being used in various locations to support first responder communication. Before we go any further, I’ll let you know I have a lot of information to share and a short time to do it so I’m going to break all the rules about how many points you can put on a Powerpoint slide since you all can read and I’ll just add additional comments. I’m not a vendor, only a user, and the only thing I’m sharing are ideas. I’ll be happy to answer questions when we’re finished. Revision note: Some pages have video and document links concerning the topic on that page that will appear below the presenter notes. Video links will lead to posts on the OEAS Facebook page. Some of the additional comments were cut during the presentation for the sake of time and the fact that there was already too much detail but I’ve added them back here. 1 DEFINITIONS • Think of a digital television signal as a pipe • Bandwidth can be broken down to small, multiple pipes • Some of those pipes carry TV channels, but remaining bandwidth can be used for other, non-television data streams • ATSC 3.0 is the next generation of TV technology, also known, no surprise, as “Next Gen TV” • Allows Ultra 4K over-the-air, higher color dynamic range, better audio and more robust mobile reception • Improved compression=more in the pipe= more room for additional TV channels and datacasting streams • Unfortunately, Next Gen is NOT backwards compatible. Tuner dongles will be available and stations will operate both systems for at least five years. 2 I’ve learned the hard way that it’s best to make sure everyone is speaking the same language when it comes to technology, so here are a couple of definitions for items that I may make reference to: first, Digital TV. As many of you know, the wonderful thing about digital bandwidth is that it can be broken down into smaller segments for a variety of uses. Datacasting over digital broadcast signals makes use of that capability. TV signals travel in proprietary MPEG‐2 video and audio formats, but datacasting uses standard Internet Protocol (IP). Next….If you haven’t heard about this, you probably will by the end of 2019. ATSC 3.0 is a new television technology that represents the same kind of generational change we had ten years ago when analog TV changed over to digital. Digital TV today still uses proprietary video formats (MPEG‐2 if you’re a techie), while Next Gen TV will be totally IP‐ based (Internet Protocol) We’ll be able to do more things with more space, whether that be more TV program channels, or encrypted data streams. Unlike digital TV in 2009, the FCC has not set deadlines for this conversion, but is requiring both formats (ATSC 1.0 and 3.0) to operate simultaneously for at least five years on different frequencies. However, tuning Next‐Gen in on existing TV sets will be easier than the boxes required 10 years ago. By the way, this is the system that you may have heard about that will allow the alerting systems to “wake‐up” your TV at any hour in the event of an emergency. https://apts.org/news/videos/explanation‐new‐broadcast‐standard‐atsc Another definition, since I’ll use it later, is “Common Alerting Protocol” or “CAP” which is the “language” for messaging that FEMA adopted to make digital messaging interoperative. 2 SO WHAT IS DATACASTING? • Datacasting is a way to transmit encrypted, addressable IP video and data over broadcast TV signals. The targeted audience can then receive and decode the signal to view or save in the field. • It takes advantage of a small portion of station’s bandwidth not used for TV, but it is not visible on regular television sets. • The new ATSC 3.0 TV compression standards mean more bandwidth for datacasting use and robust mobile reception. but today’s 1.0 technology can and is already being employed for transporting OETS, Wireless Emergency Alerts and a variety of other safety signals across the country. 3 If you have a first generation digital TV and an antenna and tune to any Ohio Public Television channel on subchannel nn.917, it may tell you something’s there, but report there is no (TV) signal. (nn being the actual channel of the PTV station that serves your area) By the way, the .917 shared channel designation was selected because Ohio is the 17th state and the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) that we transport from the originators to the wireless companies already travel on .911. My favorite new application for datacasting that we contributed to is being developed in California, it’s called a “Shake Alert” and gets on the air within three seconds of a seismic sensor detecting movement beneath the earth. There are also aspects of what other states call “the Ohio System” in their architecture. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ See notes on the page 5 concerning actual and virtual channels. First generation over‐the‐air digital TVs and old DTV converter boxes may show the actual channel and the fact there is a something at .917 on that channel. However, any later TVs will only show the “virtual channel” and totally ignore the .917 subchannel since it is not identified as a TV service. 3 Ohio’s OEAS SYSTEM PTV DATACASTING FOR PUBLIC ALTERTING Ohio Emergency Management Agency With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting 4 Now, let’s get into what’s already happening here in Ohio. Let me start out by stressing that the Ohio Digital Emergency Alerting System project was created by the partners you see on the screen, based on the needs voiced by emergency communicators themselves. It was a case of gathering available resources, such as the public stations, state fiber and bringing in vendors willing to write unique code for what we wanted to do in our state and deciding who was going to do it. The stations provide “the pipe,” but it’s the emergency professionals who decide what goes into it. Condensed history… with the tragedies at the turn of the century, followed by President Bush’s Executive Order 13407 concerning Public Alert and Warning Systems in 2006, FEMA stepped up its work on a digital‐concept, national system for local alerting, that we now know as IPAWS (for Integrated Public Alert and Warning System). However, redundancy and interoperability were not always top of mind in that development process. Getting back to the local origin story….Ohio’s Educational Television Stations listened to the needs of the notification professionals over a period of years, and when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting offered funds for this type of initiative, the stations were ready to bring the various interests together to actually design OEAS. The key operational partners include the Ohio Emergency Management Agency and the Broadcast Educations Media Commission that works with OARnet to provide the secure fiber interconnection between the EMA and the PTV stations, with the support of the Ohio Association of Broadcasters and other groups. CPB provided about $360,000 as a grant to fund the project. We spent every penny. 4 The Ohio Educational Television Stations and their repeater stations (before repack channel changes) Per FCC Coverage Maps 5 The combined signals from Ohio Public Television stations cover just about all of the state, although I’ll apologize that this is an old map and since the FCC has reassigned most of our stations and translators (repeaters) stations to new frequencies, some of the circles will be changing a bit… most likely we’ll see more overlap and even better coverage in the fringe areas. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Additional Background on Digital TV: Digital television has both actual frequency assignments where you can find their signals, as well as the ability to broadcast legacy “virtual” channel information. For example, here in Columbus, WBNS‐TV “10‐TV” actually broadcasts on the frequency assigned as channel 21, but when your TV finds that frequency, the metadata in the signal tells your TV that it is looking at channel 10. So, over the next three years, when you see announcements to “rescan” your TV, it’s because a station or stations in your area are approaching or at the deadline to move to their frequencies and it’s time to tell your TV to find the new locations in the TV spectrum. Important: This only applies to over‐the‐air viewing with a TV. If you watch via satellite or cable TV, you will not be effected since that company has already rescanned for you. However, cable and satellite systems also strip out the WEA and OEAS datacast info.