On my satellite, all of my network stations are St. Louis network affiliates. Those affiliates’ viewing areas all extend into huge swaths of southern Illinois; some of the counties served are a solid 175 miles away from me.
Nevertheless, whenever there’s severe weather in “the area,” the local affiliates will interrupt the networks’ broadcast for severe weather updates (especially as storm season is gearing up, like it is now). That means that I could be missing my shows while the KMOV weather reporter talks in exacting detail about hail and whatnot happening well over a hundred miles away. While I feel for the people of southern Illinois and hope they make it through OK, their hail and tornadoes are not my problem, and I’d rather watch the game.
Is the technology there to allow me to “opt out” of the affiliates’ interruptions and just watch the network feed? Obviously if it’s there, the TV, satellite, and cable industry don’t seem interested in making it available to consumers. I’m just curious if it exists or not or if it’s even theoretically possible with current technology.
I seriously doubt this would be allowed. The affiliates make money by showing advertisements during shows. If you had a way to cut to the network feed, you could do it all the time and not watch the local ads. If everyone did this, the affiliates would be out of business.
Er… the weather alerts ARE part of the “network feed”.
And no, you can’t opt out of emergency alerts. Why would you want to? I mean, I know you want to watch the game when the storm isn’t going to affect your home personally but don’t you want to be alerted to dangerous weather coming down your street?
I think he’s saying that he wants to opt to continue to see whatever CBS programming KMOV would be showing him if they weren’t interrupting that programming with weather bulletins, especially once he sees that the severe weather isn’t affecting his area.
And, AFAIK, no, there’s no way to do this. 25 years ago, when having satellite TV meant you had a big dish in your yard, and you could pull the networks’ programming directly from the satellite (rather than getting your local affiliate’s programming, which is what DirecTV gives you now), you could obviously do this – but it meant that you weren’t getting anything that your local affiliate would be broadcasting, like the local news.
But, today, AIUI, those satellite feeds are scrambled, and there’s no easy way for a consumer to get the network feed directly, other than certain shows through the streaming services that are mentioned in PastTense’s post.
AFAIK you are out of luck. I feel for you - the same thing happens here in SoCal, where the local stations will interrupt a game to tell me about flooding in Ventura Country, on the coast, which in no way bothers me here on the edge of the desert. But the EAS over-rides everything. It really is for the Common Good, but…
What he’s describing isn’t EAS though. EAS is a separate data stream that will display over ANY channel you’re watching, and in general will be only text and maybe a graphic, so you can mostly continue to watch whatever show is on. Changing channels won’t get rid of it. He’s talking about a local station pre-empting the network feed completely to put up their own weatherman blathering away about the local conditions. You could easily get rid of it by changing channels, but of course that doesn’t help the fact you’re missing the show you wanted to watch.
Interrupting Jeopardy! for tornado warnings on the other side of the state… I think the weather people take a special perverted pleasure in tweaking our elderly. This pisses them off.
They could alert people with a slow crawl banner at the bottom of the screen or somesuch. On the radio, it’s almost uncanny, they rarely interrupt any commercials. Since I reached critical mass for commercials long ago I will probably miss out on something important.
What exists would be that at least each transmitter or cable zone had its own cut in, so that the warning for events in Ventura Valley would only be seen in Ventura Valley… as people point out, they are only doing the cut in at the media content production base (where they put the localised adverts in .)
Of course they could also put the warning in as ticker bar…
It sure is theoretically possible to allow you to chose…
Broadcast the warnings on some other channel. eg a 24 hour news channel
broadcast in every channel an instruction “warning <text>”.
3.a. If your receiver is set to “follow warnings” mode, switch it to channel as in 2.
3b. If your receiver is set to ignore warnings, print the warning text as a subtitle, and play a warning hooter, and say “weather warning” subtly but unavoidably audible. It would be still be detectable to you, but if you already saw the warning 5 minutes ago ,why the heck do you need to be forced to listen to it again ???
Seems to me that for the tornado belt, they require that the warnings be absolutely on every channel, every radio station, right now, broadcast the warning .
But outside the tornado area surely it can be more subtle… just rely on mobile phone tower emergency SMS’s ??? If the person just wants to go back to sleep, they can just silence their phone. (phones should probably be programmed to ignore the silence instruction for emergency SMS’s and only go silent once once the the SMS’s are first acknowledged.)
Years ago it was my understanding that if you had one of those big dish satellites (the 8 foot wide kind) you were able in some cases to get a direct Network feed that bypassed some of the Affiliates programming. Not sure if that is even possible anymore in this age of digital TV.
Does it actually piss more people off than tune in to watch it? I think the tornado threat is way overhyped compared to the actual risk in my area, but lots of people gobble up the hype, even hype for other people. The fact that the stations aren’t just putting a crawl on the screen makes me think they have a reason to do that.
This is something that most weather people actually don’t like because the more false alarms and the more irritating the warnings are, the more people tune them out. People can die because of warning fatigue. Unfortunately, TV stations cover a huge area and if some of their listeners are in danger, they have to interrupt everyone in order to get the information to those affected.
The National Weather Service has spent years researching and developing more localized warning practices for themselves and I would bet they’re probably researching it in conjunction with TV media outlets as we speak. But, their budget is likely to get eviscerated soon, so I wouldn’t expect it to be top priority for a while.
I know that my cable company advertises that you can buy highly targeted advertising (like by “neighborhood”, whatever that means). So if you’re only trying to warn cable subscribers, there are ways to deliver more localized warnings. But, of course, not everyone subscribes to cable TV. I doubt that satellite TV or over-the-air broadcast TV can be targeted.
I’m pretty sure that the “highly targeted advertising” is spot cable :
This is talking about *commercial *time sold by the cable operator. That’s not what people are complaining about - the issue is that people are watching ,say, “The Big Bang Theory” on the local CBS affiliate and the affiliate cuts in with a severe weather update which might be important for some of the viewing area but is irrelevant for those who are far from the weather but still in the viewing area. (and really, it doesn’t have to be weather, it might be any sort of breaking news) The cable company has no ability to control what the affiliate is broadcasting and can’t show HeyHomie TBBT while southern Illinois is seeing the local CBS affiliate’s coverage of the tornado
No you can not opt out
The regional affiliates put in those localized emergency broadcasts, they aren;t going to take them out, nor give anyone any option to opt out.
The only way for you not to see them would be to watch the main feed from the network itself, and even the main feed is required to display National emergency messages.
If interrupting a minute of TV saves someones life or home or something, i’m good with that, hell commercials interrupt 20 minutes of a 60 minute show so…
We could go back to circa 1960/1970 style instead?
All channels suddenly go Breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beep beep beep “This is a message from the emergency broadcasting system, this is NOT a test. A F4 Tornado has been spotted in belview KY moving N of the I75 entrance ramp, blah blah blah”
And it keeps repeating for the next 10 minutes, and it does not matter what station i tune to, same thing, and i dont live near enough to belview ky to care about the tornado, and can not turn on the radio either because…
…it’s doing the same thing
So at least you have choices.
Not to mention, back then a lot of people half expected those tones to be followed by a message that soviet missile launches had been detected and to go immediately to the closest fallout shelter.
Based on what the OP describes (and based on my own experiences this past Tuesday, when severe weather was moving through the Chicago area), the issue doesn’t seem to be the interruption of a minute or two. It’s when the station decides that the severe weather warrants continuous coverage for an extended period of time.
Last Tuesday, the Chicago ABC station ran over 2 hours of continuous live coverage of the storms, and that sort of blanket coverage seems to have become more frequent in recent years.
It’s a lot better than what was available back in the 1960s and 1970s, for sure – I remember in the '70s, one of the stations in our town went to the then-revolutionary concept of having a little icon in the lower right corner of the screen if there was some sort of severe weather in the area (though that icon told you nothing about the exact threat or location). But, even I, a weather nerd, wonder if the continuous coverage is always called for, or may be counterproductive.