Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

Sat Mar 9 19:14:27 UTC 2019

On 3/9/19 2:04 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
> Cell phones have ATIS and 3GPP standard for emergency alerts. Cable 
> set-top boxes have SCTE standards for emergency alerts. TVs with 
> antennas have ATSC standards for emergency alerts.  Analog radio still 
> relies on broadcasters transmitting emergency alerts, i.e. that triple 
> burst of modem noise.

Any reason the ISP has to be directly involved in this?  The relevant 
government organization originating the alert could easily have a 
service to make that information available to the public via some 
standard API (maybe they do)?

Does it have to be push and application-agnostic?  Maybe that's (gasp) a 
reasonable application for Internet multicast.  Operators could help, 
here, by making sure that particular application of Internet multicast 
actually works even if other applications don't, and governments 
originating alerts could help by making that straightforward.

Is it sufficient for the streaming services to simply include this 
information in their streams?  Heck, they could just include all of them 
and let the device that's accessing the stream figure out which ones are 
relevant.  After all, it's the streaming service that knows the user is 
consuming content suitable for inclusion of emergency alerts.  The 
network operator rarely knows this directly (though we're pretty good at 
inferring it).

> 
> ISPs are also part of that, since ISPs know where their subscribers are 
> geographically located.

Do they?  They know where the account is geographically located, but 
they don't necessarily know that the device consuming the media is 
located at the account address.

Again, operators could help here by providing some sort of service to 
say "Where is my account located?", but many consumers of streaming 
media have far more accurate information based on mobile network 
geolocation information, Wi-Fi mapping, or outright GPS.

I think the solution to this is perhaps maybe that network operators 
could "help" by building in some useful features to their network 
without explicitly supporting EAS or otherwise.  After all, we (or at 
least most of us) already run pretty content- and application-neutral 
(and even -unaware) networks.

Whether it's a good idea or even necessary to make those "helpful" 
features mandatory is perhaps a good question.  At this stage, I'd 
probably lean toward no and see whether things resolve themselves on 
their own.  The Internet, et. al., is pretty good at adapting to use 
cases like this without heavy-handed intervention it seems.
-- 
Brandon Martin