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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."
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.
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.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
I Don't Own a TV
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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 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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good