Slashdot Mirror
"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.'"
I believe new fangled TVs nowadays have a special feature that keep the decibals between any certain range you prefer, or some system similar to that to keep the loud bangs down while keeping the quiet dialogue up.
It'll only be another decade before it's standard, and this law (if it passes) is deprecated.
But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'" ...every time my wife yells at me to "turn down that damned TV" because commercial suddenly starts blasting, the advertising executive for that commercial gets a 24 volt shock?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Which is technology I recall being advertised over a decade ago, I *think* by Philips.
+1 Disagree
Okay, first, thanks for recognizing the problem. But there's no way to legislate such technical detail because volume is subjective, not objective. Do you measure the peaks? The frequency spread? What about people who have hearing problems? They have a different idea of what 'loud' is. The problem is something called "audio compression" -- which results in a higher apparent volume. TV shows use a wider dynamic range than commercials -- commercials can be heard even at very low volume levels because they occupy a very narrow frequency range.
Legislate commercials to have a lower volume level and they'll come up with other insidious ways of annoying you (ie, capturing your attention)... Like shaky-cam and that annoying slow-zoom rotating text crap. Seriously... Go to the heart of the problem: Make invasive advertising illegal and give multi-million dollar fines to anyone who distributes such content. Also... bring back Congress issuing Letters of Mark. I'll take one for the executives of Fox, kthx.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
On principle, yes.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I am by no means opposed to regulating advertising; if anything, there is not nearly enough regulation of advertising. That said, unlike intrusive junk mail in all its forms -- postal, spam, telemarketing -- television advertising isn't attached to anything vital and is therefore easy to avoid: turn off the TV. No one needs television, and its one practical use -- news -- is much better satisfied by literally every other medium by which news is available. It's just a source of entertainment, and it is almost completely paid for by advertising. If you want to watch TV, the terrible hardship you must endure is hitting the mute button when the ads come up, you poor thing.
This is nothing more than a politician looking to score some easy votes by attacking something that everyone dislikes but which, since it actually harms no one, won't matter much if the bill disappears in committee and is never seen again. Congress' time would be better spent doing something about unavoidable forms of advertising instead of making a fuss about one of the few entirely avoidable forms.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Many modern TVs are running a full operating system anyway. I'm sure there's a way to hack them to make them do what you want.
From a technical aspect - How? And is it 100% correct in what it does and does not skip, or just 99% correct? I was not aware of any specific flag in streams that marks content vs commercial.
Morphing Software
Wait, the goverment says to network or whoever "Hey, make the commercials the same volume as the program" and you are complaining that the government isn't allowing you a choice? They are the one in this case trying to protect your choice of volume level!
And sorry, forcing everyone to buy a new TV for a feature when the government can implement for essentially free for everyone and at no real cost to any party involved is being technologically elitist and if you don't see how the corps just love your "solution" to death...
I take care of an elderly parent, when the commercial starts blaring at a normal volume, it is very annoying, at their volume, it's painful.
Is this just an American problem? The UK has a very similar law in place, and has done so for decades.
He's right you know, the volume IS the same. ...the trick they use however, is to speak at the maximum level before audio clipping occurs, and that's pretty darn loud.
Not only that, they also pump up the middle tones (The audible sound spectrum is ca. 100hz to 20 khz), and the frequencies at 500-3khz is where speech is located, you can make it sound like it's 10 times louder - and STILL keep the same volume. ;)
This is a well known "secret" in the business.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
There should be 2 volumes you can set on the TV.
1. Existing TV volume
2. Decibel limit
The problem is that perceived loudness is not simply sound pressure level, but it is weighted spectrally, and often has temporal qualities (a loud noise in the middle of quiet may be perceived as louder than a continuous high loudness) as well as semantic qualities (a loud gunshot is not perceived as loud as equivalently "loud" talking).
ITU-R BS.1770 is the best non-temporal/non-semantic measure we have for use right now.
...is an advertiser. There are actually lawyers I like, but I have never met a single marketing or advertising person that I didn't have an urge to strangle. It's their mission in life to lie to and get in the way of as many people as possible. At least lawyers are specific in their targeting.
Having worked in audio production for many years I can say that in my experience ignorant people from ad agencies judge how good a studio is by how loud they can mix the commercials. Its nothing to do with the TV stations.
The problem is commercials are mixed with LOTS of compression (which limits the dynamic range) and recorded to the master tape at the maximum level it can handle. Movies and TV shows are mixed with a lot more dynamic range to allow for example, a gunshot to sound louder than a voice.
If the TV stations consistently lowered the level of commercials when they transferred them into their systems (by 3-6db), then they would sit better after programs and wouldn't send us all grabbing for the remote to mute them. It's not going to stop me from muting them, but then I hardly ever watch TV as I find it mind numbingly boring and retarded.
Also in response to some sort of volume limiter that kicks in when the level gets loud, its only going to ruin your movie soundtrack and make those huge explosions small... so IMHO its a bad idea.
My idea was to scan the picture for the TV station ID which they impose over the programs but not commercials and detect which is which by this method or link the TV to a internet based service which can tell you when commercials are playing on your channel and auto-mute and dim the picture. Probably people would pay for a service like this.
Really? You make decisions because advertising annoys you? I mean, ideally yes, but factually once its caught your eye it's in your mind. These people have massive studies to determine what gets people buying, and sadly I think they know very well what makes ads effective.
In defense of the advertisers, how are they supposed to know how loud the commercials should be? The producers aren't given copies of the shows beforehand; it's not like they know ahead of time.
There are broadcast standards that define that sort of thing, part of the same standards that define the color gamut, the number of effective pixels, etc.
Personally I LOVE loud commercials - it makes auto-detecting them easy which makes thing like mythtv's automatic commercial remover work better.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
Irrelevant. The broadcasters know the commercial levels are high, compared to the show, and, given the option and technology to turn them down, do not do so. They are complicit. They could even the levels out and choose not to. Whether they are physically turning them up, or accepting them knowing they are turned up and not turning them down has the same effect.
Learn to love Alaska
"but there's no reason why the network can't apply some volume normalization."
Normalization implies you have other sources to compare sound levels against to maintain a constant volume. Guess what isn't a regular thing in the TV industry, since they focus mainly on video and not audio? Bingo! Normalization.
Also:
"Or why televisions or HTPCs can't do volume normalization."
That would require TVs to have a copy of the sound track from prior programs to perform normalization. On top of that, it would have to receive the data and decode/compute against prior shows to do normalization. That's going to take loads of power. Also, that will introduce so many potential piracy holes. Ain't happening. If simple ol' me with a GED can figure this out, I'll bet the engineers already figured it out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I am glad that I dug through the postings to find your intelligent response to the "loudness" of commercials. You are right on the nose with it being related to compression.
I have been toying with the idea of creating a "compression detector" (in hardware because I am a hardware geek) that can detect the sustained amplitude of a signal (indicating compression.. aka commercials) and then automatically pad it down by 20 dB. When the compression goes away, so does the padding. This would have a really cool effect of nearly muting commercials and could be a retrofit device between your receiver and an external amp.
If anyone with an oscilloscope looked at the audio component you can see the effects of compression. All of the signals, irrespective of frequency or natural amplitude are boosted up to a uniform level. This is also why commercials sound so harsh, normal speech has lows and highs of sound level, commercials just ramp it all up to get the maximum effect. I am sure that some marketing wankers have focus groups going that consider it a positive attribute when a commercial causes you to wince and reach for the volume control.
If there was a small circuit (like an op-amp) that could be hacked together with Radio Shack parts by any 14 year old (and the schematic freely available for download off of the internet) you can bet that some enterprising folks would mass-market a box (of course they would have to subtitle their commercials because we will all be on mute).
Tisha Hayes
My TV does volume normalisation - it has a 10-second memory of how the sound was, and uses that to stop any sudden jumps in loudness. But the advertisers/networks seem to have got wise to that and add a 10-second gap between the break in the program and the first advert.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Nonsense. Analog normalization techniques have been around forever.
I worked in broadcasting in college. We had numerous stages of normalization, depending on the input. Right before the signal goes out to the antenna stage (this was a radio station), we had a hard limiter. Hard limiters are dead simple to use. Failure to use one results in distortion if you're using forgiving equipment, or clipping if you're not. You HAVE to use it.
The lack of dynamic compression is what makes band demo recordings sound terrible, and the skillfull application of it is what makes good recordings sound great. In our studio, mics typically needed both expanding and limiting. This allows untrained speakers to actually be heard on the radio.
If you're talking about real-time digital compression-- well, that's trickier. If your audience can tolerate some delay (fine for broadcast, not fine for live performance) you can get away with what we have now.