It would be cool as well as potentially saving some lives if Plex had an option to general a scroll, or small pop up card in the corner to alert anyone watching of potentially hazardous weather. It could be based on your zip code (so you don’t get alerts not applicable to you) and could be fairly easily integrated using the APIs the national weather service has (I Imagine other countries have some thing similar). You should also be able to tweak the alerts so you only get ones applicable to you eg: you live on a hill and don’t want to see flash flood warnings, but do want to see tornado warnings.
No. No. No. This would be just one more source of potential bugs and crashes with minimal positive impact.
There are plenty of other ways to get weather info including, but not limited to, phones, TVs, internet, and many many others,
There is limited value to this kind of feature in Plex because it is simply redundant.
I completely disagree with minimal positive impact. Most people do not have weather radios and often times when watching a movie phones get muted, or otherwise ignored and a Tornado could easily impact someone in a matter of minutes and this gives them precious time to take action.
It is not a complex feature to add and the notion it would just cause crashes seems a bit presumptuous. It could be as simple as an overlay tornado icon in the corner of the screen.
Completely agree with @Elijah_Baley. There are about 8 billion weather apps for IOS & Android that will give you plenty of alerts when there is so much as a cloud in the sky.
Muted your phone? There’s this great new technology available to fix that. It’s called vibrate.
Just tonight my phone has buzzed about a dozen times with tornado watches posted and tornado watches cancelled. Know what that means? It means it rained and I heard thunder. Last thing I want is that kind of interruption in Plex.
If you live in Tornado Alley and can chew gum and walk then you know when bad weather is possible and when to pay attention.
Joplin MO and the people that died there completely negates what you said about people in Tornado alley “knowing bad weather is coming” and you also completely supported my point in it being on plex as you said your phone buzzed a dozen times and you end up ignoring it completely and thus it not being effective at warning people.
In my ideal implementation any type of advisory or watch would not pop up on Plex. Only the most serious of alerts (eg: Tornado Warning) would push an alert and it would only be pushed if your house sits inside a the warning polygon (and thus you will not get warnings for a county next to you). All this data can be queried from the NWS website and many apps already do this.
When you are watching plex it has your full attention in most cases and I really do think it could be beneficial to people. If you are getting bombarded with weather messages on plex, than the implementation is wrong as alert fatigue is one of the top reasons people stop paying attention to these things. That said when done right, are you telling me you wouldn’t want to know when a tornado warning (which means a tornado is occurring or has been detected) has been issued and you are in the direct path of the storm? Besides if you really do hate it so much, I would want it to be a setting you can turn on and off.
