Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

Livingood, Jason Jason_Livingood at comcast.com
Mon Mar 11 14:02:52 UTC 2019


+1 to Rich's note: I agree we need to be careful not to extrapolate our experiences/devices/preferences to the average person. Emergency alerts serve a valuable purpose, especially when something like a wild fire or tornado or whatever is approaching and an extra few seconds or a minute of advance warning is the difference between life or death. There are many situations where a smartphone may not be present and/or where the person for example is too young to own one.

So yeah, to answer the original question, I think a lot of platforms probably will need to support emergency alerts over the next 10 years. As the reach of traditional broadcast channels for those alerts declines, it seems natural and good for society to shift to the channels that have attention. Of course, the devil is in the details but I'm sure thoughtful engineering, UX design, and administrative rules can be devised to make it effective and not annoying. ;-)

Jason

On 3/10/19, 10:23 AM, "NANOG on behalf of Rich Kulawiec" <nanog-bounces at nanog.org on behalf of rsk at gsp.org> wrote:

    A side point:
    
    On Sat, Mar 09, 2019 at 02:04:33PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
    > Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), i.e., mobile phone alerts, are less than 10
    > years old. And mostly on the high-end expensive cell phones and the most
    > expensive carriers. People on NANOG may use mostly expensive smartphones,
    > but not everyone can afford smartphones.
    
    That's an excellent point that's often lost among people who work in
    our industry.  Not everyone is so wealthy as to afford the luxury of
    a smartphone.  And not everyone can use one.  And not everyone wants one.
    
    The first two items also happen to describe the people who are most
    vulnerable to disasters and have the most difficulty getting assistance
    recovering from them: the poor and the elderly.
    
    ---rsk
    



More information about the NANOG mailing list