Severe Weather & School Closing Alerts

The opting out of analogue sustaining network surely was ditched in all regions shortly after DSO wasn't it ?

The regions would have to remain in 'soft opt' mode throughout, but other than that no issues surely (apart for HD and possibly Jersey ?)

I suspect the vast majority of viewing of Breakfast is SD, on DVB-T1 only receivers in bedrooms and kitchens. In fact, I'm sceptical anybody watches Breakfast in HD in England given the lack of opt outs, and the fact
BBC 1 HD is hidden away way up the EPG (Thousands of HD equipped viewers are probably still unaware it even exists)

My point about Plymouth was that, until they upgraded recently, I think they still had a PAL GVG 200 as their mixer (running 16:9 PAL), so putting network on the desk would have added a PAL footprint if it was used for keying tickers.

Ah ! Yes, I'd forgotten that ! I don't think there's any other PAL 'islands' in the regions ?

The North American alerts system is multi-layered.
You get Radio alerts.

You also will get tv alerts that are stripped across all the channels (Depending on your multichannel operator. Some are full screen alerts, some as shown above are full screen on every channel.)

Then you get outdoor warning sirens. Some of them have voices that provide instruction on where to go if you are stuck outside in an open area.

Then you mobiles also are pre programmed to give you the EAS Alert as well.

And many people have and constantly urged to have NOAA weather radios. They will wake you up in the night.

That would be the best way to do it at the BBC too, that way it wouldn't need the involvement of the regional centre at all. They could just have some way of adding a caption before the region is coded (they wouldn't necessarily need one gfx engine per region). That way even if Plymuth for example have all gone home an important message could still be broadcast.

I'd imagine for the number of times it would be used it wouldn't be that viable though

Brilliant, that's a Windows Phone somehow running iOS, with a badly blurred out Windows button. Gotta love the slow-mo running into the shelter. The entire thing is a bit too melodramatic.

Them sirens really are quite frightening, don't think the UK has any sirens like them. Only one I can think of is the siren in Bracknell, Berkshire and its surroundings if someone escapes from Broadmoor Hospital. There is around 13 sirens in the area.

Going so off topic now, but they sounded last year when there was a big thunderstorm, because one of the sirens got struck by lightening
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-28361659

I hear that The Bay, local independent radio station in Lancaster, has been particularly impressive during the floods. They were affected by power cuts, then the ground floor of their building, including the studios, was under water on Saturday night. Their engineer cobbled together an emergency studio (looks like OB style kit) on a higher floor of the building, and have been providing excellent coverage of the situation since they got back on air on Sunday.

For a small station that hasn't got the resources of a big group to fall back on, that's a bloody good effort by all concerned.

Well, I was thinking of it being used routinely during breakfast, for 'run of the mill' info. Traffic and travel news
mostly. I saw a number of affiliates doing it in the US recently during the network breakfast shows, (and despite far more frequent local opts than we get on BBC B and GMB)

Are they suppose to hit the Quan on the way to the shelter?

[quote="Markymark" pid="985528"]
If I recall correctly all of the NBC Owned stations are hubbed - where all their non news programming is played out similar to ITV but each station controls their schedules. I believe the hub is the location where the tickers for Today are inserted. The hub I believe also has the ability to put up a simple crawl across the screen. I'm not sure how things like school closings are handled - where the graphics are far more complex than a simple text crawl.

But hey, at least the Canadian version is more up to date with current technology and actually doing its job. America's EAS is basically a dated dialup-esque marketing toy, why isn't it amended?



That's kinda the point here. The developers of the system made a strict design guideline regarding the look and feel of the Canadian EAS system, AlertReady. Colour, font, even the placement of the ticker itself was made uniform. They actually took compatibility and viewer legibility in mind for once, unlike the Americans with their ridiculously fast EAS tickers.