I remember the first weather alert I got on a smartphone. I was walking, briskly, from my parked car to Mad Mex. It looked like it would start raining any minute. My phone made a loud alert sound, so I stopped and looked at it. It said a storm was imminent. It started raining and I got a bit wet.
Had I not stopped to see why my phone was worried, I would have made it to the restaurant before the rain began. So, I sat down at the bar and figured out how to turn off all the emergency notifications and I’ve been good ever since.
Well, I can’t say for sure if they’re nationwide over the TV (and did say I only believed they were). But they’re broadcast on TV and radio around here and I’d be very surprised to find that this isn’t the case in most areas, especially urban ones.
I’m in suburban Chicago, with Comcast/Xfinity cable TV, and Comcast breaks into programming here with amber alarts, with the same alert tone and synthesized voice that is used for weather alerts.
One flaw in their system is that the same alert will sometimes repeat multiple times (one immediately after another) – my guess is that there are multiple counties in our Comcast service area, and each county is triggering its own alert.
NY & NJ, not on Cable/FIOS/Satellite as far as I know. The weather alerts are.
Maybe it is broadcast TV only here.
It would be a terribly stupid system honestly to broadcast Amber alerts that interrupt programs. It wouldn’t do any good in an overwhelming number of cases. Leave it on the phones. Leave it capable of Opt out.
I was certainly getting them while on Xfinity, but it may have been on stations that are also still broadcast stations, such as PBS. I could swear I’ve seen them on at least some of the cable stations, but maybe not. I’ve only had FIOS for a short time so I can’t speak to it (yet).
There are road signs on major highways that can be seen from a goodly distance away that flash license plate numbers, car models, etc., and this would be a pretty good way of giving out this information safely to drivers who could then keep an eye out for the kidnapper’s car. I have no problem with this system.
I just can’t figure out what they think they’re accomplishing by alerting people inside their homes watching TV about such things. The clip (above) of everyone immediately running out into the street and commandeering vehicles illustrates my problem with the system, which is not useless but actively annoying, and is designed for its annoyance value.
I have AT&T and an iPhone. It’s really easy to turn off Amber Alerts and similar alerts if you want to. I’ve turned off Amber Alerts because I routinely get alerts for incidents that happened a state or two (and 8+ hours driving) away and it’s basically spam. If it only alerted me about things that were actually in my vicinity that would be one thing, but I don’t need to be alerted about something that’s not happening anywhere near me.
Amber Alerts only come over my TV if they’re local, as in the area of that station’s TV coverage, the way severe weather alerts go out.
For a while, any Illinois Amber Alerts activated on Illinois TV stations and phones, and they got enough complaints about it that they also stopped doing it statewide.
And if they actually used the signs for that purpose, that would be awesome! Many times, the sign just says “AMBER ALERT DIAL ### FOR INFO” (and to show you how effective they are, I can’t remember the info number at the moment). Very rarely they’ll display a description of the vehicle involved, along with the license plate.
(a) Every electronically/digitally tuned TV I have owned has retained the last-tuned channel unless the actual flow of electricity into the power supply module has been interrupted more than momentarily…
(b) … because for decades now virtually every TV has really been in a “standby” quick-start mode when we say it’s “off”. If it’s plugged in it stays on channel unless there’s a power outage.
(c) And the same has happened with every cable/satellite box I’ve dealt with: stayed set unless mains power or the cable/satellite source signal were cut off making it reset.
(d) And, all that said, I have never experienced any category of Emergency Alert making any TV or Tuner Box “wake up” from standby mode (be it Amber/Silver or severe weather disaster). And I have been in the same room with the TV and the smartphone when those have come up.
So I don’t know what to tell you about dealing with what seems like some particularly obnoxious system configuration designed by psychopaths.
Obviously, different systems work differently in other places. There is no way for me to keep my TV on (activated by a single switch) and not get these annoying emergency alerts at random intervals. I can shut the whole thing down, but that means I’ll need to figure out what channel I want to watch, and hit at least four buttons for any (HD) signal. Not the worst problem, I admit, but still a problem.
I would be interested in hearing more from those who have found a way to disable AT&T’s tests of their weekly emergency warning alerts. These often happen when I’ve got the TV on and suddenly the set goes completely insane, requiring me to locate the remote to shut off the noxious sounds. Again, if this were an irritating but low-volume accompaniment to what sounds the TV is making, this would be a very minor problem but I can’t figure out why they need to do it every week and do it so loud. this is different from the Amber Alert problem.
The alert is loud to get people’s attention, as alerts should be. You’re the one avoiding the obvious solution to avoid the issue all because of the minor inconvenience of having to (gasp!) change the channel when you wake up!
I might have sympathy if you’d posted this just after waking up, and then apologized for that vile garbage of title. I might even try to look up your manual to see if there was a way to tell Amber alerts not to wake up your TV. But, no, you doubled down on that garbage, and admit you just wrote it to “get eyeballs.”
Do you really not get how utterly self-centered this makes you sound? You asked before if there was another “Roger_That” who people had a bad history with.
Well, it seems that Roger_That is the one who started this thread.
These systems aren’t really designed to be rational. At most, they provide a vague sense that The System cares about our welfare. Tornado sirens work on the same principle. There’s zero evidence that they do anything beneficial, but people still want them and agitate for new ones to be put up; my county has dozens of the things and we’ve had about three actual dangerous tornadoes in the last 60 years.
This sounds like a “reverse 911” service provided by the local government. It’s not universal, and in many places it’s opt-in (especially for weather alerts).
You’ve obviously got some reading comprehension issues here, so I won’t even try to correct you on the most severe of them, but much animosity as you choose to bear me, it doesn;t change one of my complaints here, namely the need for such excessive noise in the attention-grabbing process. To narrow it down even further for your limited mind, if a piece of classical were to be played at the same earsplitting volume as the annoying alarm sound, as senseless as that might be, that alone would mitigate some of what I’m complaining about. There’s no need for me to be startled, even terrified, for a moment while I realize that nothing horrible is happening, I’m just being informed of something that I need to pay a second of attention to.
This is only the smallest part of my complaint–the whole system makes no sense to me. But go ahead, be offended by the title of this pitting, and use that as your excuse to try and turn the pitting on me. What I’d recommend for idiots like you would be that you stop reading my post and return to the one I linked to from a decade or so ago. It made some of the same complaints, just not so systematically, Go find something to bitch about there.
