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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.
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.
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 /. ?)
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No, station owners want you to be able to hear the commercials even if you're in the kitchen or bathroom (or, for some commercials, even outside).
...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.
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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.
Some of us enjoy live sports, and are willing to pay the (admittedly ridiculous) price for TV service to watch them.
I have a server + raspbmc's for everything else but can't seem to break the TV habit for this single reason.
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
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 was in the same boat with you, but since MLB.tv offers a YEAR of games for what one month of cable or satellite costs I've cut that cord and haven't looked back. Supposedly the Xbox One will have all live streaming NFL games, but I haven't seen it in action yet. I hope more leagues go the way of MLB.tv- I gladly pay for the games I want to watch without getting all the extra channels or insane pricing for such little use.
Judging by the huge amounts of money that the networks have, many millions of people are still watching broadcast tv. That's great that you've got a fancy PC for watching things on but remember that tv is, in fact broadcast and that for the cost of a tv and an antennae it's still possible to watch a great deal of programming without any further cost.
... 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
if you are paying it, it isn't ridiculous.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Public air ways is one of the places it does belong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I hadn't heard of that -- but hopefully where they're going, other sports will follow. I'm completely uninterested in watching baseball, but at least they've got the right idea.
The situation with sports broadcasting is ridiculous. It would cost me well over $100 per month to get TV service with the additional extra "packages" to be able to watch all the games for the team that I follow. There is no chance that I will ever pay for that. If they had any halfway reasonable pricing for a streaming option, I'd be all over it.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
I used to buy on demand movies all the time. FIOS put an end to that with their horrible interface.
That, and disabling fast forward. If I accidentally hit 'stop' it always forgets where I was in a program and acts like I'm going to sit through 40 minutes of a show just to get back to where I was. Yes NBC, I was going to watch one of your shows but I'm not gonna sit through the first episode 1.8 times just to watch the last 10 mins.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Unfortunately you can't watch your local teams with MLB.tv, or any national game on ESPN or TBS, or any of FOX's Saturday games (even the ones not shown on your local FOX affilate). I subscribe to and enjoy MLB.tv, but I can't "cut the cord" until they start allowing me to watch my local teams (at least when they're on cable rather than broadcast TV).
The NHL does the same with Gamecenter.
"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.
Wow.. you're such an interesting edgy hipster. What do I have to do to get you to father my children?
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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'
Some of us enjoy live sports, and are willing to pay the (admittedly ridiculous) price for TV service to watch them.
Just FYI, I think you typed in the wrong address to your web browser. Probably you were going for "si" instead of "slashdot." Common mistake. :-)
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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.
Take a pie plate. Cut it into an 'omega' shape. Strip the ends of a piece of coax, tape the wires to the plate. Plug the other end into the cable-in port on any vaguely modern TV.
Look! Rabbit ears!
The FCC didn't 'mandate a shift away from rabbit ears'. They just mandated that the rabbit ears be connected to a digital tuner rather than an analog one.
I get 35 channels this way (well okay, I used an aluminum roasting pan, not a pie plate) and about half of them are in HD.
Which is about 15 more than I was getting with an analog antenna here.
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 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.
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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.
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!
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).
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and the first thing you would need to do is not make assumptions. The MR doesn't stand for mister.