If the FCC requires radio stations to have an encoder for the Emergency Alert System and one of the two major manufacturers of the devices says it will stop selling them – what then?
That’s the question broadcasters and regulators are about to have to grapple with after Tuesday’s announcement from Sage Alerting Systems that it has ceased production of its Digital Endec, model 3644. The blue boxes, which list for about $2500, are the dominant model of EAS encoders currently in use in the United States and Canada.
“Some parts for the ENDEC are no longer available,” said Harold Price, president of Sage, who added that while the company pivots to focus on software, existing hardware ENDEC boxes will continue to be supported with firmware updates and factory repairs “for several years.”
“EAS has always been an odd niche business with a very bursty sales rate,” Price said, noting that there are no plans for a new model to replace the 3644.
Scott Fybush’s observations: With Sage out of the picture for EAS hardware, radio stations will find themselves in a bind, and quickly. The only other major provider of the boxes is Digital Alert Systems, whose DASDEC units are the default option for most TV stations and cable systems. But while the 3644 is a fairly simple device to configure for small operations like LPFM stations, the DASDEC is a more complicated beast that takes some know-how to program and operate.
As for Price’s comment about the “bursty” nature of the business, it’s very true. Demand for new EAS boxes peaks when the FCC licenses new stations in windows like the one that just yielded up hundreds of new LPFM construction permits, then dies down to almost nothing for years in between windows. It’s entirely understandable that a company like Sage can’t justify the costs of keeping a manufacturing line running and updating unobtainable parts for a sales volume that could be as little as a few units a month.
In a world where so many pieces of broadcast hardware are being virtualized and most of a radio facility can be operated as software-as-a-service running from the cloud, the EAS box has remained the stubborn outlier, existing in hardware form and fed by AM, FM and weather band receivers that are also hardware-based.
Price notes that the new FCC is likely to be considering some changes to the EAS rules in the coming years, and we know some of the larger group owners have been looking at ways to make EAS a more software-based service, potentially making it part of a virtualized digital airchain along with automation, processing and metadata encoding.
In the meantime, though, it’s going to be a little chaotic. We’d expect the remaining new stock of 3644s in dealers’ inventories to be snapped up quickly, leaving LPFMs that haven’t started building their facilities scurrying to either find used units or having no choice but to buy a DASDEC instead. Will the FCC be comfortable with a continuing mandate that can only be met by a single supplier?
And there’s a larger piece to this picture, too: it’s not just EAS boxes that have a small, “bursty” market. The entire broadcast equipment landscape is a small-volume niche these days in the larger environment of electronic production. With the potential chaos of new tariffs and shortages of parts, how many other vendors will reach the same conclusion Sage just did – that the market just isn’t there anymore to justify the cost of small-volume hardware manufacturing?
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com