by Craig Johnston
TV TECHNOLOGY
The massive March earthquake
and tsunami in Japan was described
multiple times as a wakeup
call at the “Emergency Alert
with Mobile DTV” panel Tuesday morning.
Japan has a successful mobile DTV system,
and it played an active role in informing
and warning Japanese citizens during the
crisis and its aftermath.
Hideichi Tamegaya, professor at the Joshibi University of Art and Design
Graduate School, was on a train underground in Tokyo
when the quake hit, so he didn’t see the
damage happening at the surface. An hour or
so later, the train made it to the station and
he came out to the Tokyo streets, and was
able to watch NHK on his phone.
He said the description of the quake did
not help him accurately understand how severe
the damage was. “I was able to watch
the tsunami waves live on the screen. I could
not imagine how big it was until I watched it.”
Claude Seyrat, vice president for marketing
and strategy at Expway, was also in
Japan when the earthquake happened. “I
was in a meeting with a customer and then
I heard a noise and I could see the worry in
everybody’s eyes. My customer opened his
phone and looked at it, and said let’s get under
the table.”
Those stories and others tell the critical
role that Japan’s mobile DTV service played
in warning the Japanese public. Kerry Oslund,
corporate vice president for Digital
Media at Schurz Communications pointed
out that over half of Japan’s cell phone
towers went down during the disaster. “No
broadcasters were knocked out.”
An additional advantage broadcast has
is that it scales one-to-many, where having
thousands of individuals trying to stream
video over even a healthy cell phone carrier
will not be successful.
Robert Dunlop, executive vice president
of operations at Fisher Communications,
pointed out that its television stations in Seattle
and Portland, Ore., lie along the Cascadia
subduction zone, “essentially a geologic
copycat of the fault line that impacted Japan.
We thought very carefully about how prepared
we were for a similar event to impact
our marketplace.”
One point he made is that in a disaster of
that scale, competing stations will need to cooperate.
John McCoskey, chief technology officer
for PBS, noted that PBS and its member
stations have been very active in emergency
work for a long time. He announced PBS’
Landmark Next-Generation Emergency
Alert System Pilot Project to Use Mobile
Digital TV.
“We’re going to be working with a small
number of public television stations on highway
emergency alerting, using these new
techniques,” he said.
In answer to a question of what it would
take to make the American public take the
chance of an American disaster seriously,
Oslund replied: “Unfortunately, it might
take a disaster stateside for us to move more
swiftly. We would like to learn from Japan,
and be ready, even though perhaps there is
not a great amount of passion on the street
about it.”