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"Loud Commercial" Legislation Proposed In US Congress
Hackajar writes "Have you ever caught yourself running for the volume control when a TV commercial comes on? Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) has, and is submitting legislation that would require TV commercials in the US to stay at volume levels similar to the programming they are associated with. From the article: 'Right now, the government doesn't have much say in the volume of TV ads. It's been getting complaints ever since televisions began proliferating in the 1950s. But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'"
MythTV allows you to record programs and the commercials are automatically skipped without even needing a button press.
There is an issue with Dynamic range compression use by broadcasters and advertisers to increase the apparent volume of sound while staying within legislated limits. That trick is not something that can be easily regulated, unless you do something silly like requiring all sound clips to be stored on records.
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I've seen this here in Oz, smarmy TV spokesdrones telling us that the volume is no higher during the ads, this is true, as they are discussing the peak value in decibels.
What they don't mention is the loudness (the amount of sound) has been cranked right up, which is why they are too "loud"
When we want to discuss loudness, they always come back with irrelevant facts about volume.
This is NOT a signature.
I hate loud commercials too, but this is just too much government IMHO
Since Broadcasters (OTA/Cable/Fiber) all have to have FCC licenses, the government is already involved in the minutia of their business practices.
Here's what the bill is asking broadcasters to follow:
http://www.atsc.org/standards/a_85-2009.pdf
It's 72 pages and I don't have the technical knowledge to understand it all anyways, but I think the original idea of "commercials cannot be louder than the program's average volume" is a pretty simple alternative to guidelines written by the industry.
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Mod parent up. Here in Australia we already have this legislation and it's *completely* pointless. Same deal, some ninny in parliament with no real understanding of the technology involved wrote some *bs* legislation:
http://www.freetv.com.au/Content_Common/pg-Loudness-in-Advertisements.seo
The problem is coming up with an "objective" comparison of the loudness between two bits of programming. As the parent says it's more a question of compression and dynamic range than actual volume. (by compression I mean audio compression, not data compression). If you run a peak search on even the most mild mannered jane austen bbc tv program, you'll get the same reading as you do an a sham-wow commercial. It's just that the sham-wow tvc dude is trying to cram so much information in the 30 seconds that he'll run everything at -3db. Where as in the Jane Austen thing will only reach that point once or twice in 10 minute section.
But an even bigger problem is that the people making the ads have no idea what they're actually going to be screening with. How are you going to match the apparent loudness of your ad with the tv program, if you've got no idea what that program is anyway? It's retarded.
Consequently in Australia we have a vaguely written set of "guidelines" and a requirement that any tvc submitted to a network be "OP48" compliant and say as such on the slate. The result, everyone writes OP48 compliant on their slate and that's about it....
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
No, the broadcasters do NOT turn up the level on the commercials, the producers of the commercials do so - the guys running the tranmission chain at the stations run the tapes at the standard levels
It's the whole "Music loudness wars" all over - just for TV
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That's not how it works. Simply saying "current kills, not voltage" is often quoted, but misleading. If I stick my finger in my car's cigarette lighter (12 volts, capable of pushing hundreds of amps) nothing will happen. That's because no current flows. The voltage is the "pressure" of the electricity. If a supply has sufficient current to maintain 24 kilovolts across the resistance of your body, you will very likely die. To use the water analogy, voltage is pressure and current is the amount that flows. Typically it's easier to think about constant-voltage systems, which is what your house AC is (yeah it's a sinusoid but it's a constant sinusoid). This is like a constant-water-pressure system, like the faucets in your house. Turn on a hose at low pressure, and I don't care how big it is it won't kill you- imagine a MASSIVE hole in a dam or something, underwater, with water juuuuuuust barely coming out. TONS of flow (i.e. current/amperage) but zero danger since there isn't enough force to push the water through your body. Now imagine a small diameter pipe firing water out of it- like a pressure washer. Very little flow, but enough pressure (i.e. voltage) to push the water through your skin. In short, current and voltage are related by resistance. Since you can't change the resistance of your body, for a given voltage (say 24 kV) a given amount of current will flow. End of story- there's no way to increase the current without changing either the voltage or the resistance of your body.
I used to work at a TV station and we never did anything to alter the sound of any of the programming or commercials. I am sure that almost all other broadcasters have the same policy. In fact the sound Can't be louder because of the technology, if the audio is too loud the audio will become distorted or unlistionable.
The problem actually occurs when the commercial is edited down during filming and production. This is where the sound is Compressed which essentially brings all of the Lower volume portions of the sound Up to much higher volumes often equaling the the Higher volume portions of the sound. This is not really any louder. The highest levels are not affected so it's not actually louder, but since the lower volumes have been pumped up, it appears to be louder.
The summery here is that, it's not a problem with the Broadcasters, the problem is with the Advertisers. The ability for a broadcaster to detect and correct this problem would be huge if not impossible. I can understand why the FCC gave up on it the first time.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I doubt very much it has anything to do with the networks.
These "loud commercials" don't have their volume turned up per se; they have their dynamic range compressed (just like a Metallica CD), and the gain increased, making the lows as loud as the highs. This is likely done at the production stage.
The same thing happens when you have your volume cranked up for a quiet scene that's suddenly interrupted by a loud noise, only in the case of these commercials, the whole thing is a "loud noise."
Even if the TV station or cable company are careful to keep everything broadcast safe, it will sound unreasonably loud because *everything* is at peak level, unlike the program you were watching which had highs and lows and a lower average volume.
I'm not sure how you could legislate this problem away.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I think the original idea of "commercials cannot be louder than the program's average volume" is a pretty simple alternative to guidelines written by the industry.
No, the original idea is not simpler because there is no technical definition for "loudness". It is the equivalent of saying "commercials can't be prettier than the program's average prettiness".
The best thing we have for approximating human loudness perception is the ITU-R BS.1170 loudness measure, which actually is a fairly recent development, and has proven to be more accurate than the previously used measure, Leq(A). Plus we need to keep in mind the complexity of the Dolby AC-3 audio system, which is legislatively required for US Digital Television use, which itself has dialogue loudness normalization metadata and several dynamic range limiting elements.
Television sound distribution is very complex. Sound is captured uncompressed, then mixed, encoded in AC-3 for terrestrial DTV distribution or AAC for some satellite distribution, and the DTV distribution may then be re-encoded for local cable or local-into-local satellite TV. The cable systems use transport stream splicers to switch between compressed streams that may have different dialog normalization levels.
You don't need a license to operate over a private cable/fiber network. Only if you're using the public spectrum do you need a license to broadcast.
While that is true, cable and satellite systems still come under some the control of the FCC, although generally not for content requirements. It should be noted that H. R. 6209 applied to "any video programming that is broadcast or that is distributed by any multichannel video programming distributor," the latter being shorthand for cable or satellite TV provider.
My relative has a company that inserts local commercials into cable television. Frequently, local companies produce their own ads for him. Every new commercial is digitized, and he sets the volume on them one by one to be appropriate. However, the only way he figured out "appropriate" was by setting it to a a certain level, listening when it played _live_, and then calibrating future ads to the right volume based on that. His ear is the only standard for his ads precisely because the cable provider isn't doing any volume manipulation or standardization downstream of him.
"You, as a consumer, have no power in this. "
I have the power not to consume, so I don't.
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It's really not a question of how loud the commercials are.
It's how much "compression" and "limiting" are used on the audio. This affects how loud it "seems", even though the needle on the meter never goes higher than the highest peak reached by the show. It's just that the needle seems stuck on that peak.
Compression and limiting are why listening to radio wears you out--it's called "listener fatigue". Your brain has to do extra work to process unnatural sound.
Radio stations do it so that they're the loudest thing on the dial as you scan across. Advertisers do it so that their commercial gets your attention.
Without legislators capable of learning about and understanding compression and limiting, don't look for any legislation that actually solves the problem.
Somewhat off-topic, but as long as we're talking about TV sound, I'm way behind on sending a letter to the people who make "Burn Notice" to thank them for the high quality of the show's audio. The actors don't mumble or get drowned out by sound effects or added music, which is more than I can say for a lot of other shows these days.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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Interesting, I am reminded of evolutionary biology and the tragedy of the commons. One well know trait of natural selection is that it does not plan ahead. So that's why you get population explosions such as 30,000 deer on a small island, or cancer/infections committing suicide by killing their "host". Nature is a completely deregulated system and it works, thus indicating that anarchy can as well. Technically speaking, we've never left the free market, we just have groups that will collectively punish members (or outsiders) for certain behaviors. (This is also observed in nature.)
Regulation can just as easily be said to have caused the collapse because the naturally evolving mechanisms that would have prevented it ("invisible hand of the free market") were banned. Of course, since a true free market is completely amoral it is perhaps better that those practices (whatever they are) be banned. OTOH, it's not like it was a complete economic destruction, so it's also possible that a true free market has more variability than we'd like and this is just a natural low. Looking at reality, the free market is the only system that is known to work in all circumstances. All other (successful) strategies are mostly free market with restrictions that attempt to improve it's stability and morality.
You don't understand. The predatory lending practices that occurred only occurred because the deregulation that had happened only a few years before. It wasn't until the market was deregulated(becoming even more a free market) that businesses started the sub-prime loans and whatnot. The government intervention was taken away.
When the banks started to fall, none of the other banks were wanting to do anything to correct the problem until Greenspan told them to(He was trying to avoid government interference by allowing them to fix it themselves.). And when everything started to crumble, the government had to start bailing the rest of the banks out so that everyday people(even those who had nothing to do with the loans) wouldn't lose everything they had.
A regulated free market is good. An unregulated free market is scary.
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No, it doesn't. Volume can be controlled instantaneously, with or without recovery that temporarily normalizes the audio coming afterwards. To do it in high fidelity requires analysis of the entire audio segment; I don't think anyone cares if the commercials are handled in high fidelity, they just want them to not knock you for a loop. So you can set a threshold to be detected, and when it is, the gain is dropped, right then, and it doesn't go back up until N seconds without a violating peak go by. AM radios work like this, it's called AGC (automatic gain control) and it works fine. In the case of an Am radio, the actual amplitude varies as the signal propagation; so the AGC has to work pretty well. Fast attack, slow decay. That's all we need here, something to step on the offending audio when it gets too loud. Couple of knobs would make it very flexible, but again, as any decent Am radio demonstrates, doesn't need them.
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Dolby have an ~$4 dollar solution for this problem. "Dolby Volume" processors are currently fielded in about 12 to 14 Consumer devices - High end A/V receivers, a few laptops and 4 Toshiba LCD Television receivers. Look forward to the day when Dolby Volume is incorporated into a great many more devices, to include built in audio in PC motherboards. Not only will our viewing be more pleasant but surfing the net at a fixed volume will actually be possible. Support Dolby by visiting their web site for the demo and asking your equipment suppliers for this essential feature in an increasingly louder world. . . http://www.dolby.com/consumer/understand/volume/dolby-volume.html
There are standards for loudness. Dolby, for example, sets one which DVDs using Dolby sound must adhere to. That's why the DVD-Audio release of an album is often much better mixed than the CD version. The CD is made as loud as possible, the DVD has to be at a standard level.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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Hardly. The gov't sets interest rates (ala Federal Reserve). This is not the free market. No private company would set interest rates so low because of the risk of default, except when the gov't comes in and says we'll loan you the money cheap and we'll back the mortgage (fannie may, freddie mac). You have zero understanding of the situation. Free market would have solved the problem, but we didn't have it.
even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question
You mean Fannie Mae, the largest and hardest hit of all the subprime lenders who has about 40% market share and is subsidized by the government?
Here is a citation on the size of Fannie Mae: citation 1
Distribution of Bailout funds, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are second only to AIG: citation 2
So no they aren't just pulling that shit out of thin air. You could also look at government policies for the last 80 years in which the government is trying to get every American to own a home.