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US Bans Loud Commercials
bs0d3 writes "On Tuesday, the FCC passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM. It's a law that states all commercials must run at the same volume as network newscasts. The same applies to network promos. The responsibility falls on cable providers like Comcast or charter. The law will not take effect until next year which leaves it plenty of time to be challenged in court by cable providers or advertisers."
Great. If only it was 20 years ago and the Internet didn't exist.
there's standards for loudness in most countries, but they're completely ignored by the broadcasters. they take an ad that's the correct standard volume and go ahead and turn it up anyway.
Now, if they'll also ban quiet and medium-loud ones, we'll really be getting somewhere.
The problem with ads is that they, like top 40 music, are much more heavily compressed than movies or newstalk. The maximum amplitude isn't any higher though. So what measure of "loudness" is it going to be? Because if it's amplitude, then this law will do precisely nothing.
Here is a link to the FCC website for the actual text of the Report and Order regarding implementation of the CALM Act.
THIS LAW SHOULD HAVE BEEN PASSED AGES AGO.
obligatory lower case text to get past /.'s ban on too-loud posts.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
*kaboom*HEADON ...*whisper*apply directly to the forehead.
Most TV viewers.
Sorry, but you are in the minority.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Too late when they've blown your speakers or woke your neighbors up.
Check your premises.
Because sometimes, especially while listening to a quiet movie, you PREFER NOT TO BE SUDDENLY BLASTED WITH NOISE!!
It's annoying as hell. I do kind of agree with you though that it doesn't seem like something the government needs to regulate. But, hey, at least it isn't something actually evil (*ahem* SOPA). And yes, it's a bit sad that I'm glad just because something the government does isn't completely wrong.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Because by the time you mute, it's too late.
Change channels? I'm busy peeing.
This is a good thing, but people like you are deluded.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We need the "Caps Lock Annhilation Program" to stop loud posters.
Well, you're welcome to it, but *I* certainly don't need the CLAP.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Now how am I going to skip commercials? Doesn't TiVo use the volume difference to determine where the commercials begin and end?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
uh, you do know that everything to do with broadcasting is regulated through the FCC and basically always has been, right?
In an ideal world they'd have threatened revocation of broadcasting licenses due to the safety and equipment longevity problems caused by the overly loud commercials, and that would have gotten the industry to fix it real fast.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Fuck this shit, I will just go download it and not have any ads at all". And they wonder why people download TV show?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Sounds good, but how do you define "volume?" Peak decibels? RMS power of the signal? Average volume? Can I insert a few seconds of silence at the end to balance out a huge burst of noise at the beginning? Does frequency matter? Instead of using more volume, can I just shift my commercial up an octave to get around the restriction?
The FCC is implementing a law passed by Congress. The FCC did not "pass" anything.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Sirius has become as bad as broadcast radio in adopting the same sh_tty BOOM, WHOOSH & BAM intros to commercials. Who, besides 5 year-olds is impressed with this junk, anyway? I listen to a radio show and then BOOOM <sunday sunday sunday-guy voice>You're listening to ___ on Sirius __(channel name)__</sunday sunday sunday-guy voice> It would be great of FCC insists those stupid things were toned down as well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Advertisers view laws, rules, and common decency as damage and will do their best to route around it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Because sometimes, especially while listening to a quiet movie, you PREFER NOT TO BE SUDDENLY BLASTED WITH NOISE!!
It's annoying as hell. I do kind of agree with you though that it doesn't seem like something the government needs to regulate. But, hey, at least it isn't something actually evil (*ahem* SOPA). And yes, it's a bit sad that I'm glad just because something the government does isn't completely wrong.
What's so amazing about this is I have a MAD Magazine reprint parodying thise from about 1960 - Someone's watching a late night feature and can hardly hear the sound 'ah help your killing me. aaagh.' suddenly, TICK TOCK TICK TOCK ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE GETTING TO SLEEP!! and neighbors all yelling out their windows to turn the noise down. Wow. About 51 years since that bit in the magazine. Glaciers move faster.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wrong. Congress passed the 2010 Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act and it was signed by the President on December 15, 2010, a year ago tomorrow.
What the FCC did yesterday was to adopt rules restricting loud commercials, as it was required to under the CALM Act, which will become effective one year after adoption, on December 13, 2012.
The rule is based on ATSC A/85 RP (70 page PDF), which most definitely is not just a simple amplitude definition.
Because if I have to mute or change the channel at every commercial:
1) It's highly obnoxious
2) I'm likely to miss parts of what I was trying to watch
3) It defeats the purpose of advertising
It's not like they're spending a trillion dollars to do this. It's just a nice simple curb on the advertisers' bad behavior. I know some people think the government should be basically comatose, and complain whenever they do anything. But most of us like when our representatives represent us.
Nitpick:
The FCC can't pass laws or "acts" (which aren't "passed" anyway). Only Congress can pass bills which become laws when signed by the President (or via a veto override). The FCC has regulatory power over broadcast networks based on the mandates given to it by Congress, and has the power to levy fines, but it can't enact laws. There's a grey area when it comes to non-broadcast stations and cable companies, but usually they comply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commission#Regulatory_powers_and_enforcement
I'm assuming that's why the government acted so late - they were hoping for a free market solution to the problem. Because really, it's silly that the government needs to do something that industry really can do itself. All the government has to do is normally just make whinings about it, and industry goes and does it pre-emptively to prevent regulation.
In this case, no one cared enough at the stations to actually do it, the government gave up waiting for the free market to do something that's generating tons of complaints, and acted on it.
Speaking of which, here in Canada, it seems the History Channel (Canada) is deliberately doing it. The ads are always MUCH louder than the show. The show's at normal volume with rest of channels I watch (except Discovery has seemed to gone DOWN in volume...), but when it switches to ads, the volume jumps sharply. It goes soft during programming again.
And no, I'm not always watching the show, I just know when the commercials are on because they really are louder.
What about banning those annoying-as-fuck translucent station IDs, especially the animated ones?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Commercials in surround sound are just as annoying as loud commercials.
They'll intentionally bounce the sound around all over the 5.1/7.1 channels so you can't ignore it.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll share some details on the problem of measuring loudness.
Loudness is difficult to measure objectively, because loudness is what a human experiences when listening to audio. Intensity, on the other hand, is easy to measure; just get a sound level meter.
Why is loudness different than intensity? Because the human auditory system contains a natural filterbank that divides incoming audio up into multiple bands, and then applies an exponential scaling function to each band. Old books and papers call these bands critical bands; I think the more modern concept is ERBs.
For sounds that hit only one band, such as a pure sine tone, the intensity of the sound is a good approximation of loudness. But sounds that hit multiple bands scale roughly linearly in the number of bands hit. I'll give an example.
If you generate a pure sine tone at power level X, and then generate two sine tones each at power level X/2, then the measured intensity will be identical. However, if the two sine tones are in different bands, the loudness will be nearly double.
So, as a rule of thumb, the more frequency bands a given sound hits, the louder it is at any given power level. Something that sounds like white noise will be louder than something that sounds like a clear bell tone or a single flute note.
The people who make commercials know how to game the system. I'm pretty sure that there were already limits on measured intensity of commercials, but that wasn't enough to solve the problem.
Imagine you are driving along, listening to a radio show. Maybe talk radio, maybe NPR, whatever. You have the "volume control" knob on your car radio set to a comfortable listening level. The radio show only has audio at typical human speech frequencies, and isn't trying to sound loud. Now comes the commercial, which smears its audio all over the spectrum; it puts processing on the voice, with reverb and stuff. "Sunday Sunday Sunday-y-y-y!!!! M-m-monster truck demolition derby!!!" or whatever. It's not your imagination, it really is louder. But a sound level meter might say it's the same as the radio show content, or only slightly higher intensity level.
The company for which I work (DTS) has a solution to the problem called "Neural Loudness Control", and there is a white paper available that really goes into detail about this stuff, so you don't need to stop with my lame explanation. NLC has a full "loudness model" that approximates the human auditory system when computing a loudness metric; but it also can operate in a mode that follows the new standard.
Also, here's a PowerPoint presentation by JJ Johnston about loudness vs. intensity.
So the new standard, 1770, is a pretty easy-to-calculate approximation of loudness. You apply two filters: one that simulates the transfer function of an average human head, and the "RLB weighting curve"; then compute mean-square energy on the result. This is simple enough that nobody really has an excuse in the 21st Century that it would be hard to comply.
I'm a little worried that it is too simple, and there might be ways to trick it. For example, it doesn't seem to handle audio that is smeared across multiple bands to make it sound louder. But I'm not actually working in the area of loudness measurement, and from what I've heard, 1770 works okay for most stuff. It's better than no standard.
And on the gripping hand, 1770 is the law now.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
nobody submits an out-of-spec ad. it's the networks that turn them up, not the ad makers.
From our perspective, because we agree with what they're trying to accomplish. I don't agree with the means, though, which makes it very bad legislation.
Just because YOU do not agree with the means does not make it bad legislation.
We have government for precisely this reason, to restore some semblance of a balance of power between the individual consumer and the corporate giants who feel free to subject you to anything they think they can make you swallow. They are using our airwaves, and our TV sets, to say nothing about our eyeballs, they should follow our rules.
Your position seems to be you always have the right to turn it off, and any abuse you get is of your own choice. I'm not willing to make that choice. Why should I? What kind of freedom is that? The choice to take it or leave it? Screw that. They can operate by our rules, or operate not at all. Let them take it or leave it for a while. They've had their way for 30 years.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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The flight toward other entertainment channels is already in full swing. TV ownership is declining. People are dropping cable. More males play videogames than watch sports now. The baby boomers, the quintessential TV generation, have begun going on to their reward. Even basic media consumption habits (time-shifting, etc) have changed for good. TV still has more time left than newspapers do, but not much.
So turning down the volume of commercials now is a bit like repainting the ballroom after the ship has already hit the iceberg.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I watch a lot of British TV shows, mostly from the BBC. They pay a tax to access the BBC there I believe, and in return they get no advertising. As a result most British shows are better written, better paced and better produced I think, in part because the program has that much extra time to evolve the story in. :P
Of course, their series are generally pitifully short for a season (say 6-10 episodes in Britain per season, versus 22 in North America).
I think that if a big channel were to show its programs WITHOUT any commericals, they might be able to make more money in the end. Of course, I would have to be able to subscribe just to that channel through my cable company and that is never gonna happen. They are too busy matching up crap channels with the 1 or 2 decent ones in a tiering system that ensures I have to spend $100/mo to get all the stuff I want.
Thus I am killing my cable shortly. I generally run without cable at all for most of the year then sometimes break down and get it hooked up for a few months before realizing that "yes its still pretty much all shit, all the time" and cut it again. There are probably good shows on TV channels that I am not willing to spend an extra $40 to see, but I will never know it because the channels that I do have access too are all full of fucking crap like Survivor, XFactor etc - shit for the mindless masses.
If I download, I get what I want when I want it and without interruptions. If I like a series, I buy the season as a set and watch it off disks. I own a lot of complete TV series because of that. I now watch a lot of stuff on Netflix mind you, so thats changing too
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Two news anchors sitting at the news desk, one male one female, smiling in a news anchor kind of way cameras running:
--------------
Male Anchor yelling at the top of his lungs: So Jane, what do you think about our new theme music on the intro?
Female Anchor yelling back: Whaaat?
Male Anchor yelling louder: I said, what * do * you * think * of * our * new * theme * music? It's * by * Motorhead!
Female Anchor nods as if she heard him but really she didn't, starts yelling herself: It sure is Bob. In our first story...
--------------
They'll find a way around this.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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Oh dear looks like I invoked Poe's law again...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There already was a standard requiring commercials to limit loudness. A commercial could not be louder than the program it was accompanying, which meant it could not be louder than the loudest point in the programming. What that meant is if there was a single gunshot in an hour, your commercials in that hour could be very, very loud. Also, loudness was not weighted. High-pitched ringing and speaking at the same level were considered equally loud, even though human hearing is skewed (A-weighting) to perceive speech as inherently louder.
So what this really does is 1) re-define what constitutes "loud", and 2) give the process some teeth.
Not really. It keys on the average volume of a commercial needing to be the average volume of the show. We don't want averages, we want ReplayGain.
Averages can be gamed quite trivially. Think of a thirty second ad in which the first 25 seconds contain very soft speaking with bits of silence between lines. The CALM Act affords the rest of the ad the luxury of BLASTING the product's tag line at well over the current maximum volume level.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I think we have government because we all agree pure anarchy is bad.
What does 'pure anarchy' mean anyway? Serious question.
Most people haven't looked seriously into the work done in the past 50 years on stateless societies. Some experiments like Somalia show that the fall of the State leads to improved economic conditions (compared to its neighbors, not teh whole world). Dubai implemented private law when they designed their new society.
Anyway, State-form governments killed half a billion people in the 20th Century between wars and democide, so stateless societies have to at least be that bad before they're dismissed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well not ditch, replace them with network newreports, and run the "network newscast" for 0.0001 seconds at 3:03am *really* loud. If it doesn't need to be daily sync it up with the emergency broadcast test...
Normalize is junk and it doesn't do what you think it does. What you need is Replay Gain, or dynamic compression if you don't care about dynamics (ie, speech).
Take a music sample from a cd that sounds low (ie from the 90ies).
Make a copy of said sample and add a peak noise somewhere (the kind you hear when you unplug/plug your analog line in).
Make another copy and apply heavy dynamic compression.
Normalize all three. Puzzled? The first sample sounds loud, the second sounds much lower, but the third one sounds the loudest. That's why normalizing is useless, and you need something else.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.