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A Year After Ban On Loud TV Commercials: Has It Worked?
netbuzz writes "It's been a year since the FCC implemented the CALM Act, a law that prohibits broadcasters from blasting TV commercials at volumes louder than the programming. Whether the ban has worked or not depends on who you ask. The FCC notes that formal complaints about overly loud commercials are on the decline in recent months, but those complaints have totaled more than 20,000 over the past year."
It says that on average they must be the same audio level as the programming.
So, they yell, then there is a pause and then someone else yells at you.
My analog TV died just before the switch to all-digital. I never replaced it. Been CALM ever since.
Now that I exclusively use online streaming services to watch television shows, I find the commercial volume issues there are far more irritating than I ever experienced on actual television. Spotify is the worst culprit, since it PAUSES the commercial if you lower your system volume. You cannot even avoid the obnoxiously loud commercials there.
Are those the things before youtube videos?
honestly who watches broadcast TV? I haven't since I built my first media center PC years ago.
This seems like the gov't putting its dick where it doesn't belong. It's pretty annoying, but you'd really expect station owners to normalize the volumes to keep people from changing the channel right at the commercial break.
To the amount of people now viewing broadcast TV. I woulkdfnt even consider viewing commercial TV realtime.
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I couldn't tell you. I cut the cord three years ago and haven't looked back. Sure I don't get to see the latest and greatest things, and must instead wait for video/netflix, but it's been worth it.
"..pardon?"
Have FIOS set top box and going into the DVR or On-Demand menus is so frustrating because of the loud embedded commercials.
Yeah, I'm about sick of those right now.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Most /.'s I image don't put up with Ads.
I sure as hell haven't noticed ad volume - of course, I gave up broadcast TV with ads since I got my first TiVo in 2003. DVRs all they way, but nowadays I don't even watch TV that's not Netflix - only the kiddos have time to watch TV in our house (how else would I have time to post on /. ?)
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
...it's the switch from national programming to regional or zip-code based advertising.
Program.
National commercial.
National commercial.
REGIONAL COMMERCIAL
Program.
My cable network screws this up regularly on Comedy Central. South Park goes into break, and then a BLARING LOUD commercial for a local product happens.
I skip most commercials that aren't on during live sports -- but I watch a lot of live sports, and they're guilty too.
I blame an idiot working in the Cox video operations center.
It didn't effect all commercial immediately. Commercial in run or already in contract and so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The volume of the commercials in SyFy's streaming videos is what drove me to install AdBlock, so in that case it backfired on them. TV commercials don't seem nearly as obnoxious as they used to, but maybe it's just me.
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Here's what happens at my house at commercial breaks on Comcast: The program is fairly quiet, the beginning of the advertisement is just as quiet (CALM in effect) but in the last 10-20 seconds you sense that the volume is going up to just below a shout... then the show resumes and it's quiet again.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
And now it's time to ban commercials featuring unrealistically beautified people.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
But what would I know? ReplayTV for the win.,
Other than Sports there's not much point in watching live television any more, fire up the PVR and shotgun a few episodes of stuff I want to watch and breeze through advertising I wouldn't watch anyway.
Annoying ads are plastered all over, and injected into, YouTube content. Creators are getting paid piddling amounts, and the rules that sort out how much you earn are an ever morphing mess (which allows the likes of PewDIePie to Conquer YouTube) and the lack of any tact from Google regarding user friendliness, I fully expect to see a YouTube rival begin to rise soon (if it hasn't already).
To be honest I'd pay for content creators to keep the good stuff going, like the old PBS drive days, but there's nothing that combines a video service with user donations.
nm I remember now, so things still happen there? cool story.
The volumes haven't changed. Except it now seems like they start at a reasonable volume, then slowly increase in volume as the commercial continues. It could be that some people don't notice this. This also, no doubt, allows a commercial to still comply with the law since the ad's "average volume" can still be within the limits of the program it accompanies.
The complaint process itself is also extremely tedious. No person is going to want to key in all that information for every loud ad they have to suffer through.
In short: all the teeth were taken out of the law, so as usual we have another useless law that doesn't work and helps no one except those it is intended to control. Government by the people, my ass.
BTW, I'm seeing a lot of posts about how watching broadcast TV is "old-school", as if it is stupid to still be doing so. I would agree, except that it is still virtually impossible to watch live sporting events online. I'm not a sports nut, but I do like college football, and that means suffering through a lot of deafening ads.
Proverbs 21:19
But Insurance Finds Me Money!
OOooOOhh! You got to be quicker than that! /-##-\
I'll buy that for a dollar!
http://imgur.com/gallery/TIs3uBq
I stopped watching traditional TV years ago. YouTube, YLE Areena and Twitch are my television now.
There is a slight uptick in volume on a few ads, but most ads are not really loud anymore.
The loud ones I just switch to another channel to ignore. Losing the channel money.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I vaguely remember them from the time before I had a WMC extension that marked and auto-skips anything recorded through my TV tuner. I wasn't aware commercials were still around.
... or the network.
We've found that the Chicago CBS affiliate has an audio level that is consistently louder than any other station. And their audio levels seems to get louder late at night. Not exactly scientific evidence to be sure but the missus and kids can always tell when I'm watching Letterman instead of Leno because of the loud commercials.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I think we should just go back to having no law on the loudness.
But better yet, have a law that forces them to be 10x the loudness.
Suddenly watching a really sad scene, music continues on in to the credits, those rare one-off endings, DO YOU WANT CHEAP INSURANCE FOR YOUR CAR?! THEN DON'T DIE FROM THIS ADVERT AND FIND OUT MORE
It should, in theory, kill all the complainers because those are the ones that get most shocked by it, the rest will just find it mildly annoying or amusing.
PROBLEM SOLVED.
Also, the usual "take safety notices off things and let nature take its course" applies.
Somewhat. For some strange reason, overall levels have gotten a tad louder though. Either that, or my set is getting louder or taking allergy meds cleared up my ears a bit.
It's subtle, whatever it is. I'm more annoyed by multiplexed digital channels that seem to be saving bandwidth by sacrificing color information. This leads to a sort of old-school VGA look, especially on flesh tones. This is distinct from digital breakup. I'm mildly curious to know what kind of compression they are using that does this; but not enough to really care because...
...broadcast TV is becoming a media ghetto, just like they predicted it would. I don't care enough about it to pay for TV. I've done without it before. I'll just get more serious about hobbies. It'll really be better for me. If anything, they're doing me a service by making it suck.
Don't know if it worked or not, but I do know it came too late. I, along with most people I know, switched almost exclusively to streaming services where we pay much less *and* have fewer commercials. Sure, this law doesn't apply to streaming services, but most of them seem to at least pretend to give a shit about their viewers and enforce it anyway.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
At my house we've noticed that the music at the beginning and end of the shows and before advertisements seems substantially louder than the audio of the show itself. My assumption was that this was real and was an attempt to somehow skirt the intent of the CALM Act without actually breaking the law.
I have had Netflix for about 4 years or so, and I also *had* a cable subscription. Netflix does not have any ads what-so-ever. Last week I saw a free trial for Hulu Plus and I jumped on it. I was appalled that a paid service would have ads displayed in the middle of a show, then I realized that I pay for cable tv and that there are ads in the middle of all of those shows. Now, all I have is Netflix, and I am ad free. Even since I realized this, I find it disgusting that any paid service have any type of advertising.
Now I only have to back the volume off 20% during commercials instead of 40%. Before the law, it seemed to me that the worst offenders didn't so as much at turn up the advertisement volume, as they did turn down the program volume. I don't seem to need to keep the normal volume as high as I used to. However, a few notable advertisements still remain obnoxiously louder than the program (Proactive and a few locals seems to be the worst offenders), where as they used to be painfully louder, in the most literal sense.
"I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on [too loud], I go to the library and read a good book."
- Groucho
Since I'm not as much of a reader as Groucho, I just mute the television when the commercials are too loud. Beyond solving the immediate problem, there's a certain moral satisfaction in it. Heck, maybe it even constitutes some form of Pavlovian conditioning for the advertisers: after all, if they think loud commercials work, they must think that muted commercials don't.
You're welcome, mooch.
Don't watch commercials.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No, it gives them Max Headroom!
The FCC is "hearing" fewer complaints... I see what you did there!
Just to point at one example: Elementary. The commercial volume is consistently MUCH higher than the show volume, which itself fluctuates enough during the show to make it annoying to watch. If the FCC really wanted results, they could just have some automated application "listening" to programs, and fining broadcasters automatically, rather than judging effectiveness based on quantity of people with enough time to waste to go through their complaint process. Based on how easy that is, I'd say they have no desire to actually help anyone.
I don't use sites that implement digital restrictions so forgive me for my lack of knowledge.
I also don't subscribe to cable TV (Comcast is evil), other evil streaming services, or use MS Windows/Mac.
I unplugged my TV set the morning after the FCC mandated the shift away from rabbit ears antennae. After it acquy=uired a fine layer of dust, I put it out at the curb and have not watched a single tv commercial since. Have the advertisers and broadcasters missed me? I don't even care.
When they started chasing their lost audience on the net, "enticing" with 30 second and even 90 second commercials, I installed ad blockers and they work.
So the ban has worked great for me.
Fuck no.
I mean, what do we want? We want to get rid of the commercials in our program. What is the problem? Well, identifying it, of course. If it could be auto detected, it could easily be auto removed.
And here they go and give us something to identify them.
I am unfortunately not an expert on videos and the like, but shouldn't it be possible to create something like a tool that can identify the volume of the programming and if it is beyond normal to switch to something sensible? Like, say a quick zapping through the rest of the current programming (and of course switch back to your show when they finally continue).
Or another idea. Commercials don't really change, at least not often. That's mainly what makes them so annoying. You get to see the same piece of junk being hawked in the same ridiculous manner that might have been at least remotely interesting the first time you saw it, but from then on it only gets worse. And you get to see the same commercial over and over and over. Isn't it possible to identify that drivel? It may be necessary to buffer the show and delay it by a few seconds so the commercial can be correctly identified, but it should be possible to do just that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
TWC is the worst offender...all of their commercials are horribly loud.
from entering the garbage dump, only to send them foraging in the streets where children actually play, this litigation seems to have only served to push the loud ads onto youtube and other internet video streaming sites. Thanks a lot!
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
"The war ends with commercials being better integrated with the content, either through product placement or through matching the style of the content they are inserted in."
You want product placement to win? Or for the "content" to be basically one big ad?
Holy Fuck Batman! Do you have any idea what you are wishing for?
The only thing I would settle for is NO ADS AT ALL! For which I would pay cash money. The end.
When will people realise that advertising is pollution? It is just like other waste products, and piping it into your living room is harming everyone, especially children. Just say NO!
I'm an audio mixer for several of the national and regional networks. I deal almost exclusively in live sports, and I can tell you we are monitored to a ridiculous degree. We have averaging meters in our trucks (measured in LKFS), and the TOC monitors the show AND commercials (in DB on a 3s average). The TOC logs the averages with timecode and video thumbnails (for reference) and saves them, as they are the only defense they have against CALM complaints. The TOC is quick to notify us during the show if we're too loud or too quiet and the averaging is out of compliance.
The problem is, no one at home is smart enough to know the difference between a national spot, a local spot, and a spot that your cable provider inserts. So the complaint becomes "Fox Sports played a loud commercial!!1!!!1!!!one!!!" when the culprit is actually the Comcast head-end in Gary, Indiana.
Between the meters, the logging, and the constant monitoring, broadcast is jumping through a lot of hoops to be CALM compliant. But the networks don't have end-to-end control of their signal, and the end user is at the mercy of their local cable headend. Almost all of the problems you experience happen there. I can't tell you how many times we find a surround downmix where the announcers are almost inaudible, because a cable operator (and sometimes even a satellite provider) is doing an improper downmix, and the 4.1 channels are blowing out the center on the stereo feed. The networks try to QC as much as they can - most of the network offices have receivers for every cable and satellite (and FiOS, AT&T, etc) service they can get their hands on, and constantly monitor as many of them as they can - trying to find and fix the problems proactively rather than wait for the vague and usually inaccurate complaints to roll in from the FCC.
I've not had broadcast/cable TV access since 1992 (I did have a VCR, then a DVD, now it's just Netflix)
How do you get Netflix without cable? I thought cable ISPs were offering TV at negative extra charge.
If you truly paid for cable, every channel would be as expensive as HBO.
so sick, one missed the point and modded it as troll....
"I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on [too loud], I go to the library and read a good book."
- Groucho
Good luck with that when your library is closed evenings and weekends.
IMHO, the ban needs to apply to Youtube and other streaming video services.
no way, he's the one who sucks.
Show is broadcast in Dolby, but commercial is in stereo.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
That said... I notice every once in a while that I encounter a commercial that isn't playing by these rules... and it's always ones by the same companies... so while it's definitely better than it was, it's not as good as it could be (Visa commercials are probably the most grievous sinners in this department in my experience).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Stations in Indianapolis are egregious examples of quiet shows where yelling people have to have a volume setting of 18 to be heard, but commercials with ordinary talking is too loud with a volume setting of 14. And then you have to remember that some stations have a show-volume of 20 while others have a show volume of 16.
"formal complaints about overly loud commercials are on the decline in recent months"
So people just got PVRs and have stopped watching altogether?
The problem could easily be solved by, instead of regulating the volume levels, regulating that the media companies cannot own the DVR companies.
The DVR companies would then compete on features, one of which being commercial skip.
One of the very first DVRs was from TiVo. But to this day no TiVo DVR has ever offered a commercial skip feature. They even took some pains to hide their limited ability to skip ahead by a fixed number of seconds (decidedly fewer seconds than most commercials).
Ever since they started pulling this crap, i just Netflix or torrent (if no reasonable channels exist) everything i watch. I refuse to be annoyed in such a way. Fix your model or never get any business from me. Commercials on Pandora, Hulu, and YouTube don't pull this crap and as such, i don't mind them.
They still blast some commercials. I enabled normalization on my Windows 7 Media Center HTPC and the problem went away.
Normalize the Sound Volume on Your PC with Windows' Loudness Equalization Setting
http://lifehacker.com/5986236/normalize-the-sound-volume-on-your-pc-with-windows-loudness-equalization-setting
The quiet lasted one day after the law took effect. Then I was back to grabbing the remote. File a complaint? Sure, if you can find the form and fill in every detail for each instance. Obviously deliberately difficult.
But I notice that TV show theme songs are incredibly loud compared to the rest of the programming (modern family is the worst offender)
turn the volume levels down on the programming...
muggins turns up volume on TV to hear dialogue..
Ad break comes along...
feckin walls reverberate to crap musak and sales drivel, cats run for cover, seismographs all over the country react..
But hey, sayeth the TeeVee people..we're playing fair...we've not boosted the levels during the Ad breaks..
Bastards, to a man, the lot of them.
in my country, the level of commercials has been put down. But also the volume of all programs broadcasted, so the difference is still the same. that is so barking mad
I read that because of the USA rebroadcast of the Nelson Mandela tribute, under rigid interpretation of the CALM Act, the originally scheduled public service announcer for the hearing impaired, SNL's Garrick Morris, was replaced on the spot with someone who didn't really know sign language. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=butZyxI-PRs Talk about unintended consequences!
Gently reply
I'd like to see this as an option on hardware. Either have a leveler so if I'm watching a movie I don't have to keep switching the volume to keep from waking the others in the house. An averaged volume so it's all about the same. That or some type of remote headphones like Roku integrated into their remotes.
Typical action movie: normal dialogue, then quiet whispers while hiding behind something (turn it up can't hear), then crash/gunfire/explosion super loud.
I haven't seen a commercial in years.
I don't watch much with commercials in it, so maybe I have just lost my immunity, but I end up just muting the commercials because they are so damned stupid not because of the volume. The women are all snotty primadonnas who put up with their goofy reckless man-children, or else some rough and tumble he-man is trying to tell me how much I need a gas guzzling truck that can tow an airliner.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What I think their doing now, is not changing the volume but messing with the equalization of the audio. They turn down the human voice range frequencies during the program and raising them during the commercial. Because I still find myself reaching for the remote when commercials come on.
You can't watch much TV on 128 kbps or 5 GB/mo. ISDN is three times as fast as dial-up but far too slow to stream high- or even standard-definition video, as is DSL in many areas, and WiMAX, 3G cellular, and 4G cellular are capped too low. "Frame relay" and "metro Ethernet" sound like technologies designed to serve businesses, not homes, though I'd appreciate evidence otherwise. This leaves DOCSIS and fiber, and I was under the impression that far more U.S. residents happen to live in the service area of DOCSIS than fiber.
I got a receiver with Audyssey Dynamic Volume years ago and haven't had a problem. It normalizes the volume automatically and works very well.
commercial mixes have always been punched up. if you sit at a console and watch a slow-rise standard VU meter, even the wildest disk jockey's rants will average -3 to -5 dBv. on a waterfall display, you will see a hot, strong midrange that doesn't fall.
now imagine a "wall of sound" where the waterfall display is almost fully lit. that's complex music production, or your average commercial today. if you are going to peak-limit that stream to the average power of programming, which mostly is talk, the commercials disappear.
that's what viewers want. not what broadcasters want. certainly not what advertisers want.
and face it, those peak limiters are not installed. past few months on DirectTV channels we watch, for instance, the program owners are not really controlling audio content. it's apparent that whoever is walking past the console at the uplink will occasionally come over and crank the gain up or down from the sharp differences mid-sentence (I'm talking to you in particular, Scripps, but DTV promos suffer from the same issue.)
regulators are going to have to mandate a spec to plug into the audio limiters before there is any real progress. most of the units in use like Orbans have the capability to dump octave bands or the whole audio stream on a peak in any octave of the audio band. they are generally set up to punch that waveform monitor to a big white wall, with whatever the program director wants emphasized in a little peak.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Fox didn't get the memo either apparently. The difference in volume between the broadcast and advertisements is at an all time high on Fox NFL Sunday.
Oh, until certain broadcasters (looking straight at YOU, F/X, among others,) adopted crazy-ass sound engineering to blast out the advertising, everyone just understood that commercial audio levels should naturally follow that of the programming. Because, you know, for most products you really don't want your potential consumers to associate your product with being PISSED OFF because the sound level reaches levels of active Annoyance. (No matter what the ad agencies think of repetition.)
When I lay in bed (for sleep), I put the volume so I can JUST hear the dialogue enough that it eventually puts me to sleep. THEN, a commercial comes on and it's several increments louder (enough that I mute it during) and of course they play the SAME fucking commercials over and over. All for insurance,walk-in tubs, AARP, etc. The older people demographic for this shit is asleep by then!
Too bad this legislation doesn't carry over to Youtube.
That's the equivalent of saying "TV commercials are annoying, so stop watching TV at all."
Yeah, that's exactly right. And since you're obviously too much of a fucking pussy to go that route, I guess you should get back to watching those obnoxiously loud commercials and shut the fuck up about it. Right?
The Hulu streaming service has definitely complied with this law. I have noticed the commercials shown on Hulu are always noticeably quieter than the program I am watching. It's been really nice and definitely a plus for Hulu since it's one fewer thing to get annoyed over after the paying for content *and* getting ads.
nt
the (soon to be former) breadth of the DVD plan
A quick search on Google News didn't turn up anything about Netflix's alleged plans to discontinue its DVD by mail service, especially given that high-capacity broadband still isn't affordable everywhere in the United States. Being limited to 5 GB/mo doesn't translate to a desire to subscribe to Netflix VOD service.
ISTR in the old days, watching TV sport with the sound OFF, and getting audio from a radio source. Moved to the UK, where there is public radio sports coverage, and get the video highlights later (free and no adverts, except for other BBC programs).
What is this advertising of which you complain? I think the last advert I heard was for cranberry shortcake (Bob and Ray).
--
The United States Mint - One of the nation's leading producers of genuine U.S. currency.
Well, I loved loud commercials SO much that we cut the cord and no longer watch regular TV. Now I can't remember the last time I watched a commercial and I really love it!