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.
Mark.
