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