[EAS] Pandora; Walmart - EAS alerting

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Yes, Randy, we absolutely do care.  Unfortunately, as you may have heard, there's been considerable political resistance to the Commission having any regulatory role over Internet services.  

And trying to do interrupts of video streams, audio streams, games and everything else is probably best done... and most easily done... by "edge" applications on people's devices.  I notice that in yesterday's R&O regarding WEA the FCC did explicitly permit "leveraging the location-sensing capability" of consumer devices for improved geo-targeting of alerts, so there's hope and a precedent there. 

Given that adoption of local alerting applications has generally been modest... 10% of the target population would be an unheard-of success... I'm thinking this would really need to be integrated into operating systems.  So send your cards and letters to Microsoft and Apple.

In EAS there's a powerful legacy of an "upstream" interrupt approach and I don't know of anyone who's actively working on an edge solution for alerting folks using Internet-based services.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of wpio-fm

I was at the dentist office about an hour after the NPT.  I asked the hygienist if she heard the "big" NPT test.  They play Pandora in all the rooms; not just the lobby.

"No" and asked what it was about.  She told me they use Pandora for music and asked me if Pandora was required to interrupt for any emergencies.  She recalled how upset they all were that on 9/11/2001 it wasn't till a relative called way later in the afternoon that they found out we were under attack.  (Not sure what their music was then, but no alert or announcement came over it)

I've wondered if and when FEMA or the FCC will force EAS alerting in more places.  A Walmart store of shoppers will have more public ears over its paging system than a small town AM radio station.  Does the government (FEMA, FCC, Civil Defense) care about them?

Randy