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