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."

Comments

The issue has moved to the Internet

[alfrin]

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.

Re:The issue has moved to the Internet

[Russ1642]

Stop using the service then. Seriously. If something is that insanely bad then just go without.

Re:The issue has moved to the Internet

[fermion]

I tend to mute my computer during commercials, especially now that the commercials can run into 3 minutes.

I wonder if the advertisers realize that a commercial on streaming is not the same as a commercial on TV. That a three minute break on TV is ok. After all, if one is watching live TV one can wander around the house and still probably hear the TV, hear the commercial, and get back in time for the show, even if you have to do a live rewind. If you are watching recorded TV, most of the time you can fast forward which means that if a commercial is well made you are at least seeing the branding.

OTOH, since the ads on streaming has become more than a minute, I tend to mute and do something else, then back up the content if I miss something. I have heard TV executives screaming about how mad they are that they can only sell a fraction of advertising on streaming that they can on TV. But what is going to happen when advertisers realize that nobody is going to hand around for three minutes to watch the ads? Probably the same thing that happened to web sites when ad people realized that banner ads were being ignored.

Re:The issue has moved to the Internet

[tlhIngan]

I torrent ("pirate") shows and I never have any of these problems. Ever. I'd rather use a service like that but not when they go out of their way to be annoying. You cannot irritate me into buying something. You can't scream at me into buying something. You can be un-obnoxious and treat me with respect and maybe I'll be more receptive to the sales pitch. Till they figure that out, it's pirate bay for me baby.

Except they can take your show off the air because of poor ratings.

Here's a secret - the ratings you see for public viewing by Neilsen is one of three numbers - Live, Live+Same Day, or Live+7 Day. But NONE of these numbers are used by stations when determining if a show is worthwhile to continue or to cancel.

Stations buy the C3 numbers - Commericals Only 3 Day numbers. The huge difference is the L/L+SD/L+7 numbers average the ratings minute-by-minute of the entire program. The C+3 numbers include the minute-by-minute ratings of the commercial breaks only - the programming ratings are NOT included. Basically the ratings stations use measure only the ads - the content is there to attract eyeballs to the ads.

Now, the only correlation is that C+3 ratings are generally very close (usually within 0.1 or 0.2) of the L+SD number.

So TV execs are perfectly happy to ignore piracy - because those people never generate revenue, they have no influence (remember the programming is there to attract eyeballs to see ads). If a show is heavily pirated, it depresses the ratings down and the show either gets its budget cut, or cancelled.

Of course, sometimes the shows still sell ads - in product placement. And it's been shown that even syndicated shows that they have product placement ads inserted into the scene - advertising stuff that wasn't even available when the show originally aired.

The other way is subscriber TV - like how Netflix, Amazon, etc are having their own TV series paid for by subscription dollars.

Wrong Forum

[rsborg]

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 /. ?)

It's not the commercials.

[mythosaz]

...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.

Re:Cut the cord

[kimvette]

Oh, you're THAT GUY!!

Re:loud quiet loud quiet

[L4m3rthanyou]

What I'm noticing lately is that they'll mix the commercial audio "creatively" to increase its effective volume. I'll be watching a show on cable with 5.1 audio (so, mostly dialogue out of the center speaker), then have a commercial come on and pipe all its audio through both front speakers, at the "maximum" volume. The levels are probably about the same, but it still gets that "attention jolt" from the perceived increase in volume.

The other annoying trend is the use of excessive "wub wub" (bass) in ad music. Result is the same, increased distraction without "excessive" volume.

Re:No complaints here

[GumphMaster]

I Don't Own a TV

Re:loud quiet loud quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice conspiracy and you may be correct since we all know the sleaze in the ad business but at least for the wub-wub part, that is due to the current popularity amongst teens and young adults with dubstep music. A pic my daughter used to keep on her desktop said "Dubstep- my heart doesn't beat, it wobbles." For an old fuck like me, it is a truly horrendous musical genre that isn't welcome on my lawn. To imagine what it sounds like just envision what you might hear outside of a closed garage door that has 2 Transformers fucking inside. Good ol' Tranformer hate sex. This genre is popular amongst most of the nerd crowd so I dare not post this honest flame under my UID.

PRECISELY.

[Controlio]

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.

Re:TV at negative extra charge

[anagama]

I just get the internet without TV.

The reason I gave up any sort of connection originally was because I'd wake up on a weekend, and then mindlessly flip channels never finding anything I wanted to watch, and feeling frustrated. I wasted a lot of beautiful days in this fashion. Kind of like how a heroin addict has to give it up completely, I decided I didn't want to waste my life watching stuff that was bad to begin with, and worse, interspersed with commercials.

So anyway, yes, I pay a little more for my internet but I only watch what I actually want to watch, and I watch it on my schedule. The few extra bucks are worth it to me because like any hardcore drug addict, if I had TV I'd watch it, hate it, waste time, feel frustrated, and not be able to stop. I'm simply not able to be a casual watcher -- even when I go to friends' places, if they have the TV on, I just get totally sucked in and mesmerized by it. For people who can use it reasonably, it makes a lot of sense to save a few bucks. For me though, that would be a disaster.

Re:loud quiet loud quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

A DVR?

What do I win?