Geographic Filtering of Weather Alerts in TV Transport Streams
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Solution Overview
Problem
The existing Emergency Alert System (EAS) faces challenges in targeting geographically relevant weather alerts across wide broadcast areas, leading to non-localized alerts being presented to users, which are unhelpful and may cause users to ignore important alerts.
Innovation Solution
A television broadcasting system and receiver architecture that processes and multiplexes alert information with television programming, using geographic identifiers to determine relevance, allowing only localized alerts to be presented to users, thereby filtering out non-relevant information.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If weather alerts are inserted into each channel on the service, then users can receive comprehensive alert information, but users will be presented with a large number of non-localized weather alerts that are unhelpful and detract from television programming
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by filtering weather alerts based on geographic relevance to each user's location. Instead of broadcasting all alerts uniformly across all channels, the system selectively presents only those alerts that are geographically relevant to the user, thereby improving user experience while maintaining reliable alert delivery for affected areas.
2Adaptability or versatility
If all weather alerts are broadcast across the entire service area, then comprehensive coverage is achieved, but users in unaffected areas will see irrelevant alerts and may develop indifference to all weather alerts
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements local quality by tailoring alert presentation to each user's geographic location. Users receive only alerts relevant to their area, which maintains their attention and trust in the alert system, while the system still provides comprehensive coverage across the entire service area through location-based filtering.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies segmentation by dividing the broadcast audience into location-specific segments. Instead of treating all users uniformly, the system segments users by geographic location and delivers customized alert sets to each segment, thereby maintaining alert effectiveness while achieving broad coverage.
3Ease of operation
If localized channels broadcast weather alerts, then local relevance is improved, but national channels cannot provide localized alerts to users in different DMAs
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies universality by creating a multi-functional architecture where both localized and national channels can deliver relevant alerts through a common infrastructure. The system handles multiple scenarios (localized channel alerts, national channel alerts, user-specific filtering) within a unified framework, thereby achieving local relevance without proportionally increasing system complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
Described herein are techniques for transmitting alert information in association with television programming in a transport stream. The alert information may be transmitted to a plurality of television receivers for which the message may be applicable to at least a portion of the television receivers. Each television receiver receives the alert information and determines whether to output the alert information for presentation to a user.