Imagine seeing ads…
Imagine paying for ads…
This is one of those headlines for a problem I had no idea existed
Sincerely. I refuse to comprehend some people.
no thank you
Me every year at super bowl time: ❔
I still don’t get the people who say they are going to watch the Super Bowl for the ads, then the day after the game they’re bitching about how terrible the ads were.
I’m like… yeah… they are ads…
Admittedly back in the .com days there were some good ones.
I mean, you kinda answered your own question there. They USED TO be entertaining.
Adblock and piracy is the only way.
Fuck Big Media
Now we just need to normalize audio between action sequences and normal conversation, that shit hella disproportionate a lot of the time.
This is why I watch with subtitles. I set the volume based on action scenes, and they are practically whispering in conversations.
Louder commercials than TV have long been illegal, but they don’t enforce it. I know someone however that used to call or email or whatever the station to complain when they did it and they would stop for at least a bit because of those laws that went mostly unenforced.
But the less cynical more hopeful generations before us had passed those common sense laws and enforced them at one point.
Yeah they had their chance. Audio streaming services have (mostly) managed to figure out licensing agreements so all music is on all platforms.
Video streaming services all created their own walled gardens with various levels of advertising. Paramount even offered an advertising free tier but would happily advertise their own shows before other shows (noticed specifically on Star Trek shows but I imagine other providers do it too).
In the end… Fuck them. I give up on trying to figure out streaming video with all its complications. Back to the seven seas to procure my own.
You can file complaints with the FCC, but the FCC doesn’t actively monitor it. The biggest problem is that no matter how the law is written, they will find ways to abuse it. The law actually requires that the average volume of the ad not be greater than the average volume of the show. And it even specifies that the average is a running average, not just the peak vs lowest. But then loud portions of the show pump that average up. Like let’s say that during the credits you play really loud music, or really loud bloopers, well that would bump average. And if the commercial had a really long quiet period, like a long section where someone whispers the side affects a medication, well that bumps your loudest allowable portions up. They can also wait for the quietest part of a show to make the difference more significant.
And there’s much more that they can do that makes it seem louder, like frequency boosting and audio compression that are all totally legal. So, they can actually bump the apparent “loudness” of a commercial quite a bit and still be legal.FCC does not have jurisdiction over streaming.
That is true, but I am not sure why you are telling me. Responded to the wrong comment maybe?
just to clarify that this only works for TV and not streaming, because the article is about streaming
for TV, yes, not for streaming.
The socialist shithole strikes again! Capitalists love loud ads.
WHAT
Hell yeah California. Suck it, Peacock.
I think if I experience this a number of times, I’ll stop watching that channel.
W
FINALLY
Imagine when your grandmother watches them, it is already turned up too loud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain - works fairly well for audio. I imagine some sort of mean average would be good enough for balancing a movie’s loudness to the adverts.
Yeah, in the audio production world, it’s commonly referred to as a “compander”. A compressor for the loud parts, and an expander for the quiet parts. Commonly used in speaker phones for being able to pick up a large range of volumes, meeting rooms for remote meetings, plug-and-play ballroom mic systems, overhead announcement systems, etc… Basically anything that you want to set up once and then never worry about tuning. They can be a pain to properly dial in at first, but can be extremely useful.
Indeed this is an overly solved problem. Personally I prefer ReplayGain for music and some video-audio productions while compression is great for making voices clearer. Thinking about adverts, compression would likely be the winner for making it less jarring decibel wise.
Is this loud, or just boosted loudness?
Where I live it has been illegal to up the volume for publicity, but not to cram it so full of loudness the clipping cuts your hair.
Now do broadcast TV.
That was passed federally in 2010 under the CALM Act
Oh wow. In that case it is definitely not being followed on my local stations.
That’s because enforcement is largely based on viewer reports. And nobody bothers to report them.
finally! This has been a scourge for decades.
They say “average” volume. What do they mean by that? Or, more precisely, how are they measuring that? RMS? LUFS?
Probably LUFS, but even with LUFS there are ways to make perceived volume louder while remaining within a threshold
How many times do we have to get laws like this passed?
I swear I feel like all consumer protections have just been thrown out.
