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
