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House Passes TV Commercial Volume Bill
eldavojohn writes "About a year ago, legislation was introduced to control the volume of TV commercials. It passed the Senate in September and has now been passed in the House as well. This problem has dated back to the 1960s, but after the president signs the bill, broadcasters will be subject to regulations of the Advanced Television Systems Committee on what is 'too loud.' Of the last 25 quarterly reports from the FCC, this has been the number one consumer complaint in 21 of them. Within a year, you should start to notice a difference, with commercials no longer forcing you to turn down the TV volume during breaks in your regular programming."
its not only an american problem. you chance up on a video on youtube or something else around the net, and suddenly -kaboooom. your house is vibrating with some shitty american commercial. volume just ramps up like there's no tomorrow.
that was an affliction for everyone. not only americans. ironic that not the free market, but REGULATION is what's fixing that crap.
Read radical news here
...that Billy Mays didn't have to live to see this day.
lots of comskip programs out there. I'm using a video editor called 'video redo' that does seamless cuts at the mpg mode and only re-encodes the cut/join part. ideal for saving edited tv shows.
I have my mythtv capture system save the .mpg file, video redo edits it and it has its own comskip feature that locates and lets me tweak the 'red areas' where the commercials are. it has a 'plot mask' to black out most of the screen so you don't have to view the content while editing.
life is good again ;) I have not seen a commercial since I started using this. shows are now 20 minutes shorter, too.
this is nice for those who don't have pvr's of some sort, but the war has already forced most of us to TOTALLY eliminate ads.
just like firefox and adblock/noscript make browsing more pleasant again, same with comskippers.
one channel seems to put all its commercials in SD and the show, itself, is in HD. let me thank them so much for making it TRIVIAL to detect when commercials come on. danke again for being stupid, tv execs.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
ironic that not the free market, but REGULATION is what's fixing that crap.
How is that ironic? The problem with commercials providing revenue to copyrighted material in a "free market" as you call it is completely not "free market." But without getting into pedantry about how television is one of the furthest things from a free market as possible, it makes complete sense since if you want to watch some video, you must watch the commercial. You want to watch The Office on NBC.com? Well, you have to sit through a particular commercial. You can't switch to another better, quieter, more appealing commercial. If commercials were a product then your 'free market' quip might have some meaning but when they're pretty much being shoved down your throat by the idea and design of marketing, your selection choice is instantly removed. Simply put, I can't watch whatever I want and request only commercials that appeal to me. If I did, I'd only be watching Adult Swim commercials if I ever saw any. Government regulation was the only way to combat this. Television commercials have always been approaching Geocities quality with flashing marquee tags, blinking tags, dancing jesus', flying toasters and music that cranks up to eleven and plays once the page loads.
My work here is dung.
Can we make the same for movies as well? I'm fed up with turning up the volume to hear the dialogue, then getting blasted with the stock footage of an airplane landing.
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
but did this really need and act of Congress to solve?
Well, apparently, the "invisible hand" that magically fixes world hunger, world peace, climate change and all other troubles that ever ailed mankind has failed in this one.
Hm, could be because you as the viewer aren't a participant in the market - the market exchange is between the TV station and the marketing company.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I didn't read TFB, but: How do they measure? As far as I'm concerned, it is not trivial, taking into account tricks put to use by tv stations to fool measurement. Where I live, similar law has been in effect. Loudness is measured by standarised means (ITU-R BS1770-1). And guess what - nothing changed, because no proper equipment has been passed to the regulators...
The answer is yes, the free market wasn't solving it and I'm not sure that the FCC has the power without being given it to regulate that.
Additionally, right now you're not likely to see much useful legislation going through as the Republicans have vowed to pretty much shut down the Federal government in a bid to derail the Democrats ability to actually get anything done so that they can claim that the Democrats didn't fix any of the problems for the 2012 Presidential race.
What I end up doing is muting the TV, perusing SlashDot or my news feeds and forgetting about the watching TV. I'm betting I'm not the only person like that either. It's their loss more than mine, I think.
According to the latest poll (How much TV do you watch in a week, on average? ), we hardly watch any TV!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Dynamic range compression? What we have (had?) in the UK was a decibel limit, so in some cases* they just lifted everything under the limit to increase loudness. Lots of hassle for that. The law seems to legally enforce ATSC guidelines for loudness on programming when broadcasting ads, which on my cursory reading means that there's a strict loudness level and dynamic range they have to work to.
*Notoriously, when Lost came over here they ran an extra ten minutes of ads per episode and made them ridiculously loud
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This isn't a matter of personal responsibility, this is a matter of corporate irresponsibility. Sort of like MS with that damned alarm sound that goes off whenever there's an error. It doesn't seem to respect the volume setting and if you're using ear buds causes acute discomfort.
The advertisers have pretty well demonstrated that they aren't competent to be trusted to make reasonable choices so the government needed to step in and tell them what they were going to do. I'd like to see them do the same thing with those stupid Flash ads that cover content randomly and the ones that take up more of my bandwidth than the rest of the web page.
BILLY MAYS HERE for TechKnob! Are you tired of hearing really loud commercials? Well, hear them no more with the patented deluxe Commercial Volume Reducer! Using advanced commercial detection technology, it automatically detects when a commercial is coming on, and reduces the volume 50% for you! Available for $19.95, call now!
I am officially gone from
Just be glad that Congress is doing anything at all right now.
You just broke my sarcasm detector.
Bipartisanship won't happen as long as voters are rewarding the GoP for refusing to compromise and the press is hounding the Democrats to compromise even when they've been handed a mandate to govern. Compared with the Republicans being urged not to compromise even when the voters hand them a significant defeat at the ballot box.
Given that the GoP is proudly asserting that they won't actually participate in any governing nor will they allow the Democrats to do so either, I'm not sure what if anything is going to be accomplished.
Ignoring whether or not you are in favor of this (I kind of like it myself)...
The U.S. Congress does not have the right to regulate the audio volume of your television.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
So you think until major problems are "solved," nothing else should be done? Are you one of those people who think that if a city has 1,000 police officers, as long as the murder rate is above 0 every single one of those police officers should spend 100% of their time trying to prevent murders?
I'm sorry your remote control lacks a Mute button. The "invisible hand" must have passed your house when they were handing them out.
Sort of like MS with that damned alarm sound that goes off whenever there's an error. It doesn't seem to respect the volume setting and if you're using ear buds causes acute discomfort.
You know, you could just go to Control Panel\Sound and change the error sound to a .wav that is quieter while you wait for Conrgess to do this for you.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
If its been nearly 50 years then it ain't that big of a problem. This is not only a waste of congressional time but now we will have to eat the cost of review and enforcement. Great. Especially as some TV's have automatic volume control which addresses this kind of 'problem'. Go buy one if you are that bothered by loud commercials and don't saddle the rest of the country with the costs to protect your delicate ear drums.
Now whats going to wake me up when I fall asleep on the couch? An Infomercial?
There were already regulations which limited volume.
This is measure of relative change which is kinda odd to enforce.
In analogue transmission you wanted to watch over driving the audio level because it can effect power output. There were also decibel levels which were too hot and could cause many issues and even some with the receiving set. In a digital world when you drive past 0 there is no overhead for such levels and most equipment simply limits (rather poorly). In all cases there were limiters in place to ensure nothing was over driven or if at least it was then it not cause any issues beyond quality drop.
With a ceiling of 0 we typically operated at a nominal volume of -10 on tones. This has a fair bit of room in and typically you try to avoid peaking at 0 because this is hot and sounds awful. However, nothing is stopping the next station from operating at -8 or -12 as their nominal operating range. In fact, newer digital equipment also started doing away with 0 as the hard ceiling. Audio is very much relative from station to station.
Now, so we have the basis for how hard ceilings work and the measures generally put in place to solve problems. However, I don't know of too many pieces of audio equipment that can catch audio acceleration issues and adjust. Really, when discussing relative change and not hard limits it is a matter of rate of change more then anything else.
In the near term this means everyone has to start manually reviewing their carts and hopefully watching at least the bars to see how hot a carts audio is. In the long term, those shops that can afford it (which is surprisingly not the majority) will have to purchase some fancy new gear.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Some people seem to be putting this off as an example of a market failure when in truth it's not.
Many TVs have features that allow you to level out the sound from programming to commercials (kind of an old school ad blocker). That is how the market has seen fit to address this problem.
Also, the market hasn't done more than than because this is more of a minor annoyance than a real problem (and yes, I do find it annoying, especially when I have a sleeping kid in my arms and they get woken up by the commercials). It's also not like the sound is getting louder and louder and louder over the years.
Markets work, just not always in the way that people expect.
Smith made the same mistake Marx did. He assumed people WOULDN'T be greedy, selfish, self-absorbed bastards only concerned with elevating themselves and fuck everybody else. Both of their idealized systems require idealized people to make it work. A genuine free market is the same thing as the workers' paradise, an impossible, and naive, fantasy.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
That's only true if one considers the programs to be fungible. Personally, anyone who tries to tell me "If you don't like the loud commercials during Big Bang Theory, then go watch the Jersey shore instead. Those commercials are quiet" is not only missing the point, but deserves to be kicked in the groin.
Interesting. I thought Adam Smith specifically supported patents and copyrights. Could you show me where in his works he said he doesn't? Please, go look it up. See what he actually believed, read Wealth of Nations yourself. Despite the libertarian caricature of him, Adam Smith believed that government regulations were absolutely vital to the functioning of a free market, that government should grant copyrights and patents, enforce contract law, build roads and infrastructure, and basically do everything it is now doing in the economic sphere.
Adam Smith WAS NOT a libertarian. Do not try to rewrite history to make him one.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
One of the OP links summarizes the law thus:
"The new law will require them all to comply with standards approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. Those standards have, up to this point, been characterized as mere 'recommended practices'; once the President signs the CALM Act, those standards will be The Law."
That article then links to "ATSC Recommended Practice: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television", which is Document A/85:2009, 4 November 2009. Lots of observations and experiments, and not having the time to read through in detail yet, I'm not sure if it will fix the problem or if it will give ammunition to the FCC to rap knuckles when they get complaints.
Still, the good news is that the politicians aren't making their own standards up, but rather elevating a document done by people who understand the topic.
>>>the press is hounding the Democrats to compromise even when they've been handed a mandate to govern
They lost that mandate a month ago.
As for the press: ABC, CBS, PBS, and MS-NBC are the most pro-democrat channels you could find. Their reporters cried on the air when the Democrats won 2008. I don't see how the Dems could have any more positive support from the press.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Good point. As long as something big is going on, no small things should be taken care of.
Natural scientists do this too sometimes - abstraction central. Ever hear of the physicist whose mind works in a frictionless vacuum, for instance? (obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/669/)
I did call out an econ professor one quarter on all the abstractions; his response was to the extent that they're necessary to make any progress in thinking about the problem, rather than get bogged down in detail calculations (one quote went along these lines was "I've seen everyone form freshman undergrads to PhD's have their research bog down because their project scope had too many details")
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
and in AC/DC circuits the difference between ideal values and actual values can get folks killed
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Your title doesn't follow from your body text.
Please, when you claim to know what Adam Smith would or wouldn't like, back it up with a quote from him, okay? Otherwise, you are just making shit up. You are flat out WRONG about him, and I KNOW you have not read Wealth of Nations. If you had, and you had understood and remembered any of it, you wouldn't be making the claims you are.
Let me pass on some choice quotes for your edification.
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
-Book I, Chapter VI, pg.60
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.
-Book I, Chapter VIII, pg.80
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
-Book I, Chapter VIII, pg.94
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
-Book I, Chapter IX, pg.117
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workman,its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
-Book I, Chapter x, Part II, pg.168
With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.
-Book I, Chapter XI, Part II, pg.202
Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
-Book V, Chapter I, Part II, pg.770
The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons.
-Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article I, pg.786
The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more then that of people of some rank and fortune.
-Book V, Chapter I, Part III, pg.845
For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.
-Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article II, p.847
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.
-Book V, Chapter II, Part II, pg.892
It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
-Book V, Chapter II, Part II, Article I, pg.911
Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.
-Book V, Chapter II, Part II, pg.927
Wow. Looks like the real Adam Smith disagrees with your imaginary Adam Smith in a great many particulars.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton