Rising EAS hardware and maintenance costs due to aging encoder/decoder ecosystem

Cluster and group owners incur $2,000–$8,000 per station per refresh cycle in rushed hardware purchases, emergency installation, and engineering overtime, with multi-station groups absorbing $50,000–$250,000 per upgrade wave, plus additional soft losses from spot make‑goods, missed political windows, and exposure to FCC penalties in the tens of thousands of dollars if EAS failures or misconfigurations occur. • Group owners and large clusters incur $50,000–$250,000 per upgrade wave in rushed encoder/decoder replacements, premium-priced last-available units, emergency installation and engineering overtime, plus incremental risk of FCC fines or lost contracts if stations fall out of EAS compliance, with an effective per-station burden of $2,000–$8,000 per refresh cycle. • Group owners incur $2,000–$8,000 per station per unplanned EAS refresh cycle in hardware, installation, and engineering labor, plus additional soft losses of $5,000–$25,000 per cluster per wave in lost or discounted ad/promotional inventory, missed political impressions, and staff overtime caused by reactive, manually coordinated changeovers instead of planned, consolidated upgrade projects.

Engineering and operations leaders juggle EAS refreshes manually by maintaining ad-hoc spreadsheets of each station’s encoder/decoder status, warranty, firmware, parts availability, and vendor contacts; they rely on email and messaging threads to coordinate last-minute purchases, swaps of spare units between markets, and emergency bench repairs to keep logs clean and stations on-air and compliant. • Engineering and operations teams scramble to keep aging EAS boxes alive using ad hoc spreadsheets to track serial numbers, firmware levels, parts cannibalization, and vendor RMA status; email and messaging threads to coordinate who has spare units; and last‑minute spot or promo schedule shuffles to free engineering time, all managed outside any unified capex/opex planning tool. • Engineering and ops staff stretch aging hardware far beyond intended life by cannibalizing parts from retired units, buying used/refurb gear from secondary markets, manually tracking firmware and compliance issues in spreadsheets, and juggling last-minute quotes from multiple small vendors instead of a standardized, centrally managed refresh plan.