Could tvOS 13 Be Bringing Emergency Alerts to the Apple TV?

Apple’s set-top box could someday get one step closer to letting you completely cut the cord by replacing another important, albeit less commonly seen feature of cable networks: emergency alerts.

A report shared by iPhone in Canada showed indications that Apple may have quietly added support for Emergency Alerts to the Apple TV in tvOS 13.

Although nothing in Apple’s release notes had anything to say about the feature, Canadian Apple TV user Jeff Ashton saw an Ontario Amber Alert issued late yesterday afternoon suddenly appear on his Apple TV.

iPhone users throughout southern Ontario received the Amber Alert via their mobile devices, which was issued by the Niagara Regional Police Service in response to five children abducted by a man believed to be heading toward Toronto in a gold pickup truck.

Emergency Alerts

Over the past few years, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) have been rolling out Emergency Alerts to the mobile phone network, allowing widespread broadcasts of anything from Amber alerts for missing children to reports of extremely hazardous weather conditions and natural disasters.

With just about everybody carrying a mobile phone in their pocket these days, a widespread alert system makes a great deal of sense, and Apple has also embraced the feature, somewhat controversially prioritizing the notifications to bypass all of the normal iOS silence and “Do Not Disturb” features to sound the alert whenever your iPhone is in any state other than simply “off.”

Has Apple Added Emergency Alerts to tvOS?

That said, it’s not entirely clear whether this is a tvOS feature, as it’s entirely possible that it could have been sent to Ashton by an app that he was using on his Apple TV at the time. The image shows an NHL logo in the background, suggesting that he was using an app from a television content provider that may have delivered the emergency alert through its own channels, in much the same way that cable broadcasters have been doing for some time.

For one thing, it’s not technically possible for the Apple TV to receive these kinds of alerts directly, since they’re transmitted via the cellular providers over an LTE connection, and the Apple TV of course lacks any cellular hardware. Further, the alert screen shown, while definitely getting the viewer’s attention, appears to be decidedly un-Apple-like in its design, making it seem even less likely that it came from Apple’s core operating system.

Of course, it’s still not outside the realm of possibility that Apple could provide this service, but it seems that alerts would need to be forwarded to the Apple TV over the internet in some way, and since emergency alerts are usually geographically targeted, there would be privacy implications that Apple of all companies would be loathe to ignore. In other words, it seems that something in tvOS 13 would at least advise users that this feature was available, if not also requiring that they opt into it in some way.

So as great as an idea as this may sound, it seems unlikely that it’s a core tvOS feature — at least not yet. Apple has, however, been expanding support for notifications in recent tvOS versions, so it may soon be possible for third-party apps to take advantage of this, but right now, very few apps even use the notification capabilities that were introduced in tvOS 11 two years ago, and Apple seems to be continuing its approach that most Apple TV users have mobile devices which are far better suited for receiving and displaying notifications — especially personal ones.