Digital Alert Systems, Telos Alliance And Nautel Collaborate On Emergency Alert Virtualization

Digital Alert Systems, Telos Alliance and Nautel have joined forces to “reimagine EAS alerting for radio’s increasingly virtual, IP-driven world.” This approach, called EAS At The Edge, was demonstrated at the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Unlike legacy EAS implementations that have gone unchanged since the 1990s, EAS At The Edge “brings the emergency alert process into the interconnected AoIP world by leveraging modern IP-based content distribution and control to route alerts precisely to their required destinations,” the companies said.

Traditional EAS deployments depend upon cascading layers of hardware and multiple boxes — often one per transmitter, even when serving combined transmission sites in a single market. EAS At The Edge replaces stand-alone hardware centricity with an intelligent, one-to-many approach that places critical hardware at the edges of the air chain. Utilizing IP-based content distribution to control and insert emergency messages via the Livewire AoIP protocol, EAS data can be geo-targeted for precise alert routing, with a single input node shared for insertion to multiple streams, resulting in significant cost savings through a streamlined, forward-thinking approach.

How It Works
EAS inputs are decoded and filtered at the closest possible point of reception. Forwarded messages are then encapsulated in an IP format containing audio, control, and alert metadata using Digital Alert Systems’ EAS-Net protocol to enable RDS alert text display and additional alert details.

This information package is passed directly through the station’s IP network to the target device or devices on the opposite “edge” of the network — essentially, the last device in the air chain. Using this model, a broadcaster can geo-target EAS alerts to ensure they are correctly routed.

“This efficient, easy-to-maintain, one-to-many distribution model provides both practical benefits and preserves critical public safety functions. The flexible nature of IP-based systems ensures that EAS At The Edge complies with current regulations and can address future FCC regulations as they evolve,” the companies said.

They added: “Similar edge-to-edge systems have been successfully deployed in video environments for years; applying this model to radio as well will cover even more broadcast use cases. With virtualized EAS device monitoring and compliance reporting leveraging the power of software-based air chains, content distributors can now provide critical local emergency information to their listeners with less hardware and expense.”