Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

Wed Mar 13 02:36:40 UTC 2019

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019, Michael Thomas wrote:
> This seriously seems like something that needs formal standardization.

No one is paying me to work on this, so I don't plan to spend time 
doing free tutorials for Amazon, Apple and Google program managers; or
money flying to standards meetings around the world.

I think, within 5 years or so, its inevitable that smart TVs and smart 
speakers will support emergency alerts.  The only questions is whether 
the ecosystem owners do it voluntarily or it becomes mandatory.

Standards and APIs for emergency alert messages have existed for 5, 10, 15 
years. Depending on which standard.

Google's non-profit arm created a global alert map using those standards 
several years ago.  Note the .org versus .com.

https://www.google.org/publicalerts

NOAA National Weather Service updated its API for weather alerts a couple 
of years ago, making it easier to get active alerts for a specific 
geographic coordinate, i.e. your house, school, etc.  You no longer need 
to download all the alerts in a state.  Documentation on the NOAA API is 
on the web site.

https://alerts-v2.weather.gov/

The FEMA API requires signing a MOU with Homeland Security to retrieve 
non-weather alerts directly from IPAWS. The IPAWS API isn't intended for 
end-users. However there is no limitation on companies redidstributing 
those alerts. That's one source of Google.ORG's public alerts for its 
map.

https://www.fema.gov/integrated-public-alert-warning-system-private-sector

Intelligent assistants already know where your smart device is located. 
People even inform the intelligent assistant which room those devices are 
in.  There is no requirement for intelligent assistants to report that 
information back to government alert originators. Its more or less a 
one-way feed of alerts.

The formal standards are published by OASIS.  The great thing about 
standards bodies is there are so many to choose from.

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=emergency

Emergency alerts use the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) specification.