Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

Tue Mar 12 01:25:35 UTC 2019

On 3/11/19 7:02 AM, Livingood, Jason wrote:
> +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. ;-)
>
This entire thing strikes me as a horrible layering violation. Why on 
earth should alerts be required to dogleg through content providers? And 
what is a "content provider" anyway? My pizza delivery app? It looks 
like it sets up a lot of single points of failure. You can understand 
why it's that way for tv and radio -- there was only one way to deliver 
the side channel -- but that's completely untrue in this day and age. 
And while the point about not everyone having access to smartphones is 
valid, we need to keep in mind that any attempt to shoehorn this into 
content is going to take a decade of bickering and pushback. Does 
anybody think that in the US every phone, tv, etc, will not be internet 
enabled in 10 years?

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.

Mike