My mother will never give up cable and switch to streaming-only, because of her deep and abiding love of fast-forwarding through commercials on shows she’s recorded on her DVR. It’s her remote-wielding right and she will not relinquish it! I, on the other hand, have been streaming-only for years, and for most platforms I subscribe to the (microscopically) cheaper ad-included plans. This is how I know far too many pharmaceutical and insurance jingles than any one human should be subjected to. I know many of you know this pain as well. Have you also noticed that a lot of the time, the ads are glaringly LOUDER than whatever program you’re actually trying to watch? Well Californians sure noticed it, which led to Golden State legislators recently passing a law that bans commercials from being louder than the movie/TV show being streamed:
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill, SB 576, that had been shepherded by Sen. Thomas Umberg (D-Santa Ana) through the legislative process. It had passed unanimously on the Senate and Assembly floor earlier this month in Sacramento.
The passage means that, starting on July 1 of next year, major streaming services won’t be able to “transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany,” the bill’s text reads.
The law asks streaming services to follow the Federal Communications Commission’s Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which went in to effect in 2012 for linear TV and radio but does not currently apply to streamers. That effort was spurred by the FCC receiving more than 130,000 complaints in 2010, “the vast majority of which concerned the excessively loud sound of commercials,” the state’s Assembly analysis recounted.
“Many platforms have introduced tiered subscription models that require consumers to pay a premium to avoid commercials, bringing ad-supported viewing, and the loudness of those ads, back into focus for millions of users,” the Assembly briefing noted. Indeed, price hikes across the board from streaming services have by default pushed consumers to the cheaper options, which now include regular commercial breaks just like old school TV.
A bill analysis by Senate Legislature committee staff noted that the Motion Picture Association, which lobbies on behalf of Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Amazon MGM Studios, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery, had voiced opposition to the effort.
“The Motion Picture Association says that since streaming services are working voluntarily to address the issue of loud advertisements, SB 576 is unnecessary,” the analysis read. “They note that many streaming services have undertaken reasonable efforts to adjust the loudness of advertisements that come from server-side ad insertion that may be inconsistent with the loudness of the programs.”
Newsom, on signing the bill on Oct. 6, touted its volume-lowering impact, saying, “We heard Californians loud and clear, and what’s clear is that they don’t want commercials at a volume any louder than the level at which they were previously enjoying a program.”
I’d like to take this opportunity to commend the lawmakers who make the time and effort to name their policies in such a way that there’s a clever resulting acronym. Case in point: the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM. It’s all in the details! And speaking of, those few at the top making fortunes off streaming are such sneaky f–ks, ignoring the CALM Act because it didn’t explicitly refer to streaming (even though it was a logical extension). It’s the same playbook for how these Scrooges have been cheating actors out of streaming residuals. Anyway, good on California, and I hope the movement spreads east! What I find annoying is not just how loud commercials are overall, but how a lot of the time now it’s contrasted with TV/movies that are increasingly hard to hear! (Or do I need to make an appointment with my ENT?) There’s a whole slew of entertainment that is mumbling verging on inarticulate in audible dialogue levels, to the point where a lot of the time I wear my air pods when watching TV so that the sound goes directly into my head! I know it makes me sound (noise pun!) like an old fogey, I can live with that.
Photos credit: Janet Mayer/INSTARimages.com, Netflix, Disney press
