Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

Tue Mar 12 18:56:46 UTC 2019

On 3/11/19 8:24 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2019, Michael Thomas wrote:
>> It seems to me that it would be much better to use the standards we 
>> already have to deliver text, voice and video, and just make it a 
>> requirement that some list of devices must be able to listen for 
>> these announcements and act accordingly. It's not like compositing 
>> video or muting one audio stream in favor of the other is rocket 
>> science.
>
> Ecosystem owners control what their smart devices do (and won't do). 
> The major smart device ecosystem owners don't allow other parties to 
> control their devices without going through ecosystem owner controlled 
> APIs.
>
> Amazon controls what echo speakers and fire tv do with alexa.
>
> Apple controls what apple tv and apple homepod speakers do with siri.
>
> Google controls what google home speakers do with google assistant.
>
>
> I think you are correct, Netflix and Hulu are at the wrong layer. 
> Netflix and Hulu don't control the smart TVs and smart speakers 
> ecosystems used to present their content.  Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri 
> and Google Assistant do.
>
> Yes, there are add-on apps for weather and news, but without support 
> by the ecosystem owner in the base operating system, add-on apps can't 
> interrupt other Apps. I understand why ecosystem owners wouldn't want 
> to give third-party Apps an API to interrupt other Apps. Ecosystem 
> owners could include emergency alert functionality controlled as part 
> of the base operating system/intelligent assistant, preserving 
> whatever UX it wants without allowing other third-parties to interrupt.
>
Yes, that's exactly my point: it should just be a requirement of the 
hardware platform to implement this. Just like e911. Enumerating the 
types of devices that are required to implement this is way easier than 
enumerating the types of apps/sites that need to implement it. All the 
government needs to do is set up the server infrastructure to source the 
alerts.

Mike