ESPN Faces Proposed Fine for Improper Use of Emergency Alert Tones | Hacker News Reader

ESPN Faces Proposed Fine for Improper Use of Emergency Alert Tones

fcc.gov

49 pointsimpish920823 comments

> ESPN has a history of noncompliance with the Commission’s EAS rules and was fined in 2015 and 2021 for EAS violations.

Sounds like the previous fines didn't sufficiently motivate the correct behavior unfortunately.

The fine is a pittance. I usually scale these to a median household income, let's call it $80k. A quick Google says ESPN's revenue is $2.48B/y. To ESPN, this feels like how a $2.73 fine feels to a median household, or a $0.45 / instance fine.

As the article notes, it's the statutory maximum, so the FCC's hands appear a bit tied.

I would use Disney’s figures.

Oh I was definitely tempted to! But the ESPN-only revenue was already a stark enough contrast, and technically Disney only owns 80%. (Though I suppose you could do a weighted average of the two parent companies' revenues.)

The fine is a signal that the FCC is paying attention. The FCC has a lot of power in addition to this fine and ESPN doesn't want to provoke them. If ESPN behaves badly enough, Congress can give the FCC what it needs. It's better business to just pay it, move on, and stop using the tones.

This is what happens when you turn Marketing loose and tell them to do whatever it takes to get the viewer's attention, and the consequences are immeasurably small. Companies will converge on "abuse." Reminds me of radio advertisements playing loud police sirens or car horns, to falsely capture the attention (panic) of drivers listening to the radio.

Back in August 2019, Kimmel's show engaged in the same transgression. Since then, Disney requires every employee that works in TV or a related industry (including ESPN) to regularly watch and complete an online course about EAS tones. Not enough I guess.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019/08/16/FCC-fines-Jimmy-K...

Is there a video of the offending ad somewhere? I couldn’t find it with some basically googling.

Can't find a copy of the 2023 incident, but here's a video of the 2013 incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq0kBgirAQw

$150k well spent on marketing

Good. It's a pity the statutory penalty is so low.

lol ESPN even admitted they did this intentionally, somebody in marketing surely must have lost their job.

they probably got a raise

:sad-face:

you mean some intern will get the blame?

does anybody have more information on what these "emergency alert tones" are? is it talking about tones on specific frequencies that trigger some sort of special handling of the broadcast, or is it simply that they used a siren sound in an advertisment?

It’s the three crunchy-sounding SAME tones you hear before an emergency alert broadcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding

Example at 0:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcs1EuBfew

In addition to being a very distinctive interruption in regular programming (somewhat panic-inducing if you grew up in the 1980s thinking an ICBM could arrive at any moment), there are weather/emergency radios that will automatically turn on when they hear the tones.

Edit: Actually we 1980s kids are more susceptible to the old two-tone EAS Attention Signal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emergency_broadcast_syste...

They played those tones? That's incredibly reckless. They're still frequently used on television broadcasts to warn about dangerous storms (hurricanes, etc)

That's the sound of summer

Because there's no such thing as climate change, we get those earlier in spring, and even into winter (Boxing Day tornado in 2015). So no longer just the sound of summer

From my faded memory, I thought they were referred to as Emergency Broadcasting System[0]. The 90s memories confuse it with Emergency Broadcast Network[1]. Not exactly the same thing though

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_Network

wikipedia does

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