Wait a second, there is proposed legislation that has actually been well thought out? Is this the twilight zone?
This legislation seems to address several key issues:
- Most people no longer watch live TV or listen to the radio, which in the past have been the ways that emergency alerts get pushed out. We have replaced these with streaming services or at least DVR.
- Now in an ideal world, it would be great to push this out to the individual devices instead of relying on the services, but in reality many devices that are currently available would not have the ability to receive such a signal, so relying on the services actually makes more sense.
- This eliminates the ability to opt out of these very important alerts and yes, the Amber alerts are important and can literally save lives, as can the other emergency alerts.
- This also establishes a program to reduce the number of false alerts and hopefully eliminate them all together, which would include things like the person talking about an alert that it was going to be 85 degree outside, that would be a false alert.
As a whole, we're in agreement. Of course, as with most things the 'devil is in the details'.
The reality (from my perspective) is that IF you are watching streaming services you likely have access to other sources of alerts. I'm in agreement that providing critical alerts is important and should be included wherever people happen to be, so this is not necessarily a bad idea.
Perhaps, instead of requiring every streaming provider to include alerts, they could be included in the host devices? Surely TV, FireTV, etc. could provide the alerting as an underlying service that would pop up regardless of what app you happen to be running. Yes?
IMO this makes a bit more sense for streaming audio where you might not be watching anything, but if so it should apply to every single streaming audio provider (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, YouTube Music, etc.)... which would be a burdensome, cost ineffective approach. There are simply too many sources for each one to individually implement the infrastructure. Also, that likely eliminates new players by making cost of entry virtually prohibitive.
Besides... in order to successfully broadcast alerts relevant to me... every single streaming provider would need to know my approximate physical location. I don't want that! Plus, what happens when I'm streaming to my car? Is Apple Music seriously going to constantly keep track of my physical location? If not, will my phone receive every possible alert then apply some filtering logic based on my location... and only then interrupt the stream to play those that apply?
It is conceptually a great idea, but I don't see this being anywhere close to implementable.
