NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study

Sun Jan 3 09:26:07 UTC 2021

On 2021-01-03 08:26, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
> On Sun, 03 Jan 2021 18:59:37 +1300, Mark Foster said:
> 
>> In my mind it's simple.� The streaming companies need to have a 
>> channel
>> within their streaming system to get a message to a 'currently active
>> customer' (emergency popup notification that appears when their app is
>> open or their website is active with an authenticated user).� The
> 
> Oh geez. Just on my PS4, there's streaming apps for Disney+, Netflix, 
> Hulu,
> Prime, Playstation Store, Peacock, Tubi, ESPN+, AppleTV, YouTube (less 
> than
> half of which I actually subscribe to, but I haven't found a big enough 
> crowbar
> to remove the others, they keep returning) - and that's probably not a 
> complete
> list.
> 
> And we get to watch them all do it in subtly different ways, often 
> buggy. Egads.

Yeah my family got a PS4 for Christmas. But we've had an Xbox One for 
the last few years. There are quite a few streaming apps, true.  But a 
lot fewer of those than worldwide telcos, or jurisdictions, or emergency 
services.

> 
> Bonus points for figuring out how to keep two streaming apps from 
> stepping on
> each other's toes, as often these apps stay semi-alive in the 
> background, which
> may be enough to cause an alert to be sent to the app. Now you need to 
> avoid a
> "thundering herd" problem if there's 18 different streaming apps on the 
> device,
> all of which just got woken up.  On resource constrained systems, 
> that's often
> the start of a death spiral as the system either runs totally out of 
> memory or
> goes into thrashing mode.

> 
> And the alternative is just saying "only the streaming app in the 
> foreground
> gets to handle the alert", but that isn't correct either - I might not 
> *have* a
> streaming app running in the foreground on the device at the time the 
> alert
> goes out. (You hit another problem as well - now all the apps have to 
> notify
> upstream

So do you want the streaming service to deliver the alert, or do you 
want the underlying device doing the streaming, to deliver the alert? 
Because I think you've gone down a layer and didn't need to.

Foregrounded App, delivering alert, feels doable.

> 
> So having every single "streaming" app have to include duplicate code 
> and
> *still* not get the alert to the user doesn't seem the right direction 
> to go...
> 

If one wanted to target the console world or smart TV world, that's 
another way of doing it - but then you need Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, LG 
etc to all be doing essentially the same thing. Not impossible, but not 
precisely within the scope of 'online streaming services'.

>> streaming company will also know the location of their customer 
>> (billing
>> information) so will know what geographic locations are relevant to 
>> that
>> customer.
> 
> Billing info may be good enough for stuff that stays at home. It 
> doesn't tell
> you what zip code a portable device is actually in at the moment - and 
> getting
> the *right* localized info to the portable device is one of the tricky
> parts of this.
> If you're out and about town while visiting your in-laws 3 time zones 
> away from
> where you live, you want alerts for the town your in-laws live, not
> for the address
> the streaming company sends the bill to.

The problem that was trying to be solved, was people who literally don't 
have a mobile device. What category of device are you trying to alert to 
that wouldn't otherwise be able to receive an emergency broadcast? Seems 
like we're getting more-and-more niche.

> 
> And that's assuming that a streaming company even *has* the info in 
> their
> billing information - I just checked, and Hulu doesn't have a street
> address for me.
> So they're going to end up having to do IP based geolocation.

... or simply collect the geographic information required, 
retrospectively, in order to comply.

> 
> Meanwhile, this causes yet another problem - if Hulu has to be able to 
> know
> what alerts should be piped down to my device, this now means that 
> every single
> police and public safety agency has to be able to send the alerts to
> Hulu (and every
> other streaming company) - and do this securely.  That's a *lot*
> bigger problem than
> "The Blacksburg VA police department only has to set up agreements with 
> network
> access providers that might be providing access to devices in 
> Blacksburg".

Sure. But the likes of Netflix will need a relationship with every 
single PD in the world? Scales nicely in one direction, but not the 
other.

> 
> Seriously guys - having the streaming companies do this is at the
> entirely wrong level.

I dunno. Providing an API and establishing a relationship with what has 
to be a relatively finite number of streaming providers seems not 
impossible.
If Netflix put up an API and you built a hierarchy for emergency 
notifications (so perhaps your local PD don't directly talk to Netflix, 
but maybe they talk to someone at state level? Then there's a managable 
chain of relationships).

If you're going to create a legislative or regulatory framework that 
requires the streaming operators to provide for this sort of thing 
anyway - as it appears the NDAA will require - it feels like a solvable 
problem to me.

With the disclaimer that i'm not a developer and i'm not from North 
America, so perhaps the scale issue is beyond my understanding.

Mark.