It's sad that such a thing needs regulation in the first place. In real life if a salesman is being inconsiderate, I'll go out of my way to avoid their sales and find someone else who is better mannered. But we don't seem to apply the same measure to ads. Ads can be brash, insulting and manipulative, and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them. Rather it appears such ads work better and now that's what everyone's pushing towards. Human psychology is such a weird thing.
nullify88 1 days ago [-]
We do apply the same measure, adblocking. Except since companies base their businesses on ads theres a cat and mouse game at play to ensure you pay them with your attention. I'm reminded of the scene in "Airplane" where the captain is fighting off sales people in the airport. I feel the same way about the Internet.
My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.
Symbiote 16 hours ago [-]
In the UK the TV would show moving black and white stripes in the corner of the screen before a commercial break. If you were recording the programme, you could pause the recording during the adverts.
I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.
Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:
Viewers thought of them as that, and in popular culture that is what cue dots are remembered as today, especially by the Map Men, but technically that is not what cue dots were.
They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.
With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.
anal_reactor 23 hours ago [-]
I've noticed that I got Pavolved and whenever I hear things like "But first" or "This is where I'd like to tell you about" I immediately rush to the keyboard, expecting a sponsor segment I should skip.
breakingcups 20 hours ago [-]
Sponsorblock took care of that for me
anal_reactor 18 hours ago [-]
I don't know, I'm just afraid of sponsorblock accidentally skipping a part of the video I'm interested in
zamadatix 18 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to auto-skip, it can e.g. just mark the different types of segments for you to make the call to skip or not. You can also still manually seek to any part of a video (even with auto-skipping enabled).
breakingcups 11 hours ago [-]
Thus far it has always been right for me, but you can tweak the settings to offer you a manual skip if you prefer to lean into it more slowly.
add-sub-mul-div 21 hours ago [-]
During baseball games I've come to get annoyed when I hear the announcer stop talking and take a breath, about to change their tone of voice from conversational to formal so they can launch into one of the micro ad reads between pitches or at-bats.
It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.
ChrisMarshallNY 21 hours ago [-]
Ads have become integrated into everything.
It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.
I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.
Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.
Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.
I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).
pilchard123 20 hours ago [-]
Some German publishers used to to that for books too, apparently. I've heard at least of cases of it happening to Terry Pratchet and Iain Banks (possibly because they wrote SF/F, which as we all know is not real literature).
Maybe its possible to feed everything in to a model that can identify the situation or context in audio or video and block a section out because its an ad. We would not be short of training material.
Latency would have to be low enough to be attractive to users.
detourdog 20 hours ago [-]
I gave up on audio books because of the unstoppable audible plug at the end of the book. If there are ads the content has to be really compelling.
psunavy03 17 hours ago [-]
Radio shows and ballgames have been doing that for literally decades. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be bothered by it. Frankly, the better announcers don't "change their tone," they just read the ad blurb conversationally and move on.
Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
badpun 20 hours ago [-]
Also „Have you ever”.
anal_reactor 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ivell 1 days ago [-]
I doubt if the ads are working better. I suspect their measurement approaches related to ads effectiveness is wrong.
If we are just measuring viewing of an ad as positive, then obnoxious ads will be viewed and thought to be effective. But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative.
ulrikrasmussen 1 days ago [-]
I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior. In the end, platforms like Netflix and Hulu don't need to prove that a higher volume works, but perhaps their customers think that it works, and that is enough.
iamacyborg 23 hours ago [-]
> I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior.
Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
iinnPP 23 hours ago [-]
This service problem is fixed like most media-related service problems. Sailing.
MPC has the ability to normalize volume in a video automatically.
s1mplicissimus 20 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that's not how human attention works. Being annoyed (or really having any strong emotional reaction) causes the ad to have a stronger impression on your memory. Now pair that with "autopilot mode" while shopping and you have a desirable (for the business) outcome.
netsharc 20 hours ago [-]
I still avoid some products because their maker paid the local version of the insufferable Simon Cowell to promote their products.
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
YOU still avoid.
But not the vast majority of consumers.
OkayPhysicist 11 hours ago [-]
My personal little doomsday theory is that the entirety of the advertising industry is built on faulty data. Approximately no one has the complete data set to determine how much an ad is worth. For direct ads ("enter promo code BLAH", "Click Here to check out the new...", there's hard data. But most of the perceived value of advertising is different: The company buying the ads has zero chance of knowing if someone seeing a car ad on YouTube 6 months ago factored into their decision to purchase a different car by the same manufacturer. Maybe the advertising platform has a chance of knowing (though Google AdSense has never asked me for my sales data), but they are strongly motivated to never reveal any results that would damage their industry. The platforms that serve the ads have no reason to thoroughly vet whether ad impressions are being accurately measured because error is almost always in their favor.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
AdrianAvtomat 17 hours ago [-]
I tend to believe this is some form of Goodhart's law running amok, but when I see obnoxious ads converting I have to wonder if the emotional response eventually boils off leaving behind that sweet sweet brand awareness.
rickdeckard 21 hours ago [-]
I'd say the metric is simply "if it's suddenly louder than the content before, we have the users attention and eyeballs".
> But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative
In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
Frankly, if the volume is too high I think the annoyance would be mostly directed towards the entire service playing ads at all, not the maker of the individual ad.
bluefirebrand 19 hours ago [-]
> In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
This really just tells me that either I'm an outlier (probably) or advertisers are morons
If I remember something annoyed me with an ad, I will move heaven and earth to avoid their product
I loathe advertising in general and the more intrusive it is the less I want your product. I keep a shit list of particularly irritating brands and go out of my way to avoid them
rickdeckard 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, one would think that it works the same for everyone, but in fact it helps to be attention-grabbing, regardless of how.
I have a related anecdote:
Several years ago there was a huge level of competition among brands to position their Bluetooth speakers at retail stores. The stores had a table or a shelf with a large variety of different speakers, companies competed on price, quality and design, created expensive display racks with buttons to demonstrate the quality of different content, paid the stores fees to put up those display-racks, etc.
Then, JBL decided to reduce the component costs for the speaker and put the money into colorful LEDs instead. Not as an end-user feature, but to grab the attention of the customer at the point-of-sale and stand out from all those other speakers.
This completely disrupted the market, and within 2 months they were the number one brand in Bluetooth speakers in low/mid price-segments. Their Audio quality was lower compared to others in the same tier, but they were the most attention-grabbing speakers in every store, creating the most sales.
Lesson for the entire industry: Cut the BOM for audio-components in the speakers and add LEDs!!
Within a few months the entire Bluetooth-Speaker shelf of all retailers was full of speakers with flashing LEDs...
dahart 18 hours ago [-]
Personally I feel like keeping a list of annoying ad brands and avoiding them would take up too much of my mental space, and it would lead me occasionally to bad purchasing decisions. Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying, but basically all companies have to do it and they tend to do what works and behave similarly. As long as I have a choice, I’ll avoid advertising in general, regardless of whether it’s annoying.
This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
bluefirebrand 14 hours ago [-]
> Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying
I think the difference between you and I is that I think it is always manipulative, and therefore is always very annoying
There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
neves 20 hours ago [-]
I don't mind ads in the beginning of movies, but I hate with my full heart all companies and products that interrupt a tense scene
rkomorn 20 hours ago [-]
Sorry for the mini rant but... One of the things that annoy me about TV shows is that the pacing on shows that were designed for network TV with ads is so predictable you can know whenever a tense scene is going to have an interesting outcome or not.
Tension somewhere between the usual ad boundaries? Nothing's happening. Tension near the 7 or 10 minute boundaries (depending on 30 or 60 minute shows)? Something's gonna happen.
It makes TV shows predictable even when watched on an ad-free platform.
wingspar 19 hours ago [-]
I think that is bumping into the standard three-act structure common in fictional narratives.
Maybe if you consider that the "three-act" structure is forced onto 20 and 40 minute runtime shows at precise time windows.
What I'm talking about is far less visible, if at all, in adless 60-minute runtime episodes.
Edit: and "what I'm talking about" is clear before-the-ad cliffhangers with after-the-ad "rewards" in the form of events that advance the plot.
randycupertino 15 hours ago [-]
> all companies and products that interrupt a tense scene
reply
Like the PEPSI vending machine, brightly lit up and just happened to be there PERFECTLY working order in the middle of an apocalypse to provide a refreshing Pepsi to Brad Pitt at the tense zombie cat-and-mouse moment in World War Z?
Whether or not this actually turns into purchases, I would imagine that obnoxious == memorable, and therefore advertising companies believe more memorable ads will turn into more purchases.
immibis 17 hours ago [-]
AFAIK even annoying people with ads still makes them more likely to buy your product. Even making people think "ugh, I'll never buy that" still makes them more likely to buy that. They do this stuff because it works. Even if you think it doesn't work, it still works.
everdrive 19 hours ago [-]
>But we don't seem to apply the same measure to ads.
I actively avoid buying things if I keep bumping into their obtrusive ads.
colechristensen 16 hours ago [-]
I think the solution is to recreate and reenforce United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. for the modern age, forcibly separating the production and display of video media.
That means Netflix couldn't make any of it's own shows, you wouldn't have each media company with its own streaming service.
Add on top of that standard fees for streaming royalties which were how do I say contract free syndication. As in you don't need to make a deal with a studio, any company can have anything in their streaming library and everybody pays the same fee (maybe with something like a 1 year lockout, but anything made available on one would be required to be available on all).
Then you have a real market for streaming services and productions instead of all of these little monopolies. Consumers get to choose with their wallets instead of tying the art with the corporate policy.
lotsofpulp 19 hours ago [-]
> In real life if a salesman is being inconsiderate, I'll go out of my way to avoid their sales and find someone else who is better mannered.
I do. I don’t watch things with ad breaks.
beAbU 18 hours ago [-]
> It's sad that such a thing needs regulation in the first place.
Profit motivated business (i.e. almost all of them) have a fiduciary duty towards the owners or shareholders. They are legally bound to maximize profits at all costs. If they don't do this, the leadership will be found guilty of dereliction of duty and be sanctioned.
Business aren't people, therefore human morality does not apply. Regulations are the only thing that keeps this behaviour in check. It's the nature of the beast unfortunately.
> and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them
It absolutely has a negative outcome for them, there is a post on the front-page of HN right now about how a California law is forcing Netflix and other streaming services to turn down the volume of their ad breaks.
thayne 1 days ago [-]
> It’s modeled off a federal law passed in 2010 that caps ad volumes on cable and broadcast TV, but doesn’t apply to streaming services.
Why did that law not apply to streaming services in the first place? The internet was very much alive and kicking in 2010. Sure, streaming wasn't as prevalent as it is today, but it wouldn't have taken a lot of imagination to see the same problem would become an issue on the internet as well.
idle_zealot 1 days ago [-]
The Internet, and before it, computers, broke our legal system. There are loads of things that we decided were bad and banned, but "thing but on computer" or "thing but online" somehow were interpreted to be exempt.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.
bigmattystyles 1 days ago [-]
The video store example is funny because iirc, it wasn’t until someone high up/very involved in government got bit by it. During Robert Bork’s failed Supreme Court confirmation, a reporter figured out he rented porn. Maybe it was something less raunchy / embarrassing than porn but either way, iirc, they got that law on the books fast after that….
05 22 hours ago [-]
The leak was inspired by Bork's opposition to privacy protections beyond those explicitly outlined in the constitution. [0]
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. [1]
The VPPA very much applies to online entities. Netflix can collect all the info it wants about you, but is very much limited in what it can share with external parties.
If anything, the law has given cover to shady walled garden business practices that would not have survived otherwise.
extraduder_ire 24 hours ago [-]
Last time I looked up the Bork bill, I read that it was extended to streaming sites during the Obama regime.
JdeBP 12 hours ago [-]
You read wrongly. The 2013 amendment merely allowed customers to consent to disclosure electronically via the Internet. Before then, it had to be in writing. It didn't change 18 USC § 2710's explicit application only to a "video tape service provider", and that is how the law still reads today.
Ylpertnodi 20 hours ago [-]
'Obama regime".
'Nuff said, mate.
hydrogen7800 18 hours ago [-]
I think until now, the only real thing preserving these consumer protections (and civil rights, while we're at it) was simply the practical difficulty of collecting and compiling that information. Now it's trivial and effortless to collect this information. The old laws still apply, but now the rubber meets the road in actually having them enforced.
>"thing but on computer"
From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
2OEH8eoCRo0 22 hours ago [-]
How about liability for publishers? New York Times publishes something damaging and false? Liable! YouTube publishes something damaging and false but since they did it with a computer they're immune!
ridethebike 21 hours ago [-]
you can be very much liable if you publish something damaging and false on YouTube
2OEH8eoCRo0 15 hours ago [-]
YouTube publishes it and promotes it, they should be liable.
Braxton1980 3 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't this cause YouTube to heavily censor and regulate content to avoid lawsuits?
masfuerte 20 hours ago [-]
Now that youtube and meta and tiktok choose what is put in front of you they are the publishers. But the law, passed for the early web, is stuck in the past.
Nasrudith 18 hours ago [-]
Congratulations, you fell victim to the 'platform vs publisher' liability misinformation. It doesn't work like that and has never worked like that, nor should it except for the perfidious pushers of that misinformation.
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
ndriscoll 16 hours ago [-]
If a librarian put a book out on the front table with a "recommended reading" sign then yeah that seems fair for them to carry some liability if that book were actually libelous. And so it should be for recommended posts on sites like Youtube, Instagram, etc. A chronological or alphabetical index is a factual catalogue of information. A recommendation is you vouching for the material. Totally different.
kelnos 17 hours ago [-]
> Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
Braxton1980 3 hours ago [-]
>. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices
Why
masfuerte 18 hours ago [-]
It worked like that before they changed the law and it can work like that again.
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
2OEH8eoCRo0 15 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Why do people keep saying we don't understand it or it's misinformation?
tzs 1 days ago [-]
My guess, having only looked at the text of the law but not into any of the legislative history, is that it was for technical reasons. This is based on how they worded it. The text says it applies to "a television station, cable operator, or other multi-channel video programming distributor".
This suggests they were thinking of linear television. Some searching tells me that in fact this is how it was apparently interpreted, for when it was applied to cable TV it was not applied to on-demand cable programming. It was just applied to the regular cable channels.
With linear TV everything is prepared in advance. When they sell an ad slot they know what program they will be showing at the time. There's plenty of time to match the ad volume to the program volume, which I suspect in 2010 could not be reasonably automated.
With on-demand you don't know what programs the ad will be in until the program actually starts. You could potentially be showing that ad in thousands of different programs at approximately the same time. If the level adjustments could not reasonably be completely automated this may have been impractical.
toast0 13 hours ago [-]
> With linear TV everything is prepared in advance. When they sell an ad slot they know what program they will be showing at the time. There's plenty of time to match the ad volume to the program volume, which I suspect in 2010 could not be reasonably automated.
Not really. There's a lot of live programming. Ad campaigns may be cancelled and replaced close to the time of airing. Local stations and cable systems preempt national ads and insert their own ads at times.
The way this was resolved was not by tuning ads to the content they interrupt, it was by setting standard audio levels for all programming and tuning the ads to fit that standard.
lostmsu 22 hours ago [-]
This feature would take less code than your comment.
tzs 18 hours ago [-]
In 2010, on the equipment at most TV and cable companies?
ndriscoll 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah you calculate ReplayGain metadata for the media and let the playback client do normalization to a target level. Unless it's live streaming, pre-calculating gain levels is a non-issue. All the CD ripping/music library software in the 00s already did this because of the loudness war.
lostmsu 18 hours ago [-]
In 2010? Certainly.
asdfwaafsfw 1 days ago [-]
The US government typically doesn't try to preemptively regulate things (which is getting to be a problem as it now is too sclerotic to respond quickly to developments). Streaming services in 2010 were mostly paid subscriptions with no ads, I don't think the idea was on anyone's mind.
thayne 16 hours ago [-]
YouTube existed in 2010, and was primarily supported by ADs. Sure at the time it didn't really show what would traditionally be considered television, but it seems like the same logic would apply.
yardie 19 hours ago [-]
I'm reminded of how many patents that were due to expire after their 20 year lifespan got renewed simply by adding "using the internet" tacked on at the last minute.
jrnng 1 days ago [-]
It was still niche. Government is slow to react and is paid off by lobbyists and more recently outright bribes..
mrbonner 20 hours ago [-]
What about YouTube? I was watching a cooking show there with my kids the other day when, out of nowhere, an ad popped up, something about a jacket called “Bear” something. A man in the ad was trying to unzip his jacket, but his awkward, jerky movements looked shockingly inappropriate to the woman standing behind him. It was horribly embarrassing for the whole family, and to make matters worse, the ad blasted at twice the volume of the show we were watching.
Whatever the product is, they will never have me as a customer.
1234letshaveatw 19 hours ago [-]
Google has also decided it is somehow appropriate to run commercial break length ads now for low production quality/budget user generated content. If I watch a dude filming himself with his phone explain how to best change a bike tire, should I be bombarded with ads similar to the nightly news? Nice value proposition
anothereng 19 hours ago [-]
this is why i believe ad blockers are perfectly moral to use for families
onesociety2022 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, Youtube Premium subscription is very affordable and lets you have an ad-free experience. I reward services if they offer ad-free versions for a reasonable price.
frakt0x90 19 hours ago [-]
And everyone else.
aquir 20 hours ago [-]
I don't use streaming service so I was not aware that this is still a thing! Back then (20 years) ago when we had a cable television I can remember how much I hated that my wife wanted to sleep to the TV but I always got waken up by the much-much louder ads!
I would like to be a fly on the wall to hear the meeting when they discussed this law...it's a shame how someone/a company can be driven by money this much.
ChrisMarshallNY 21 hours ago [-]
I remember that ads used to be louder on TV, too.
What stopped that, was that TVs and videotape machines looked for loud content, and used that to trigger ad-skipping.
I didn't know about the act, but I remember when they stopped doing it, and was told that was the reason (I was around in '84).
Might be a "chicken/egg" thing.
apwell23 20 hours ago [-]
is there a programmable tv that i can do something like this ?
i want to mute ads when i am watching espn plus. my current tv is fire tv. i guess i'd have to build a little robot arm that presses mute button on the remote?
systemz 19 hours ago [-]
if you want to automate pressing buton, there is something called "fingerbot"
kstenerud 24 hours ago [-]
What I've been looking for in a player client is automatic loudness adjustment.
Even in the show itself, sudden loud bits just send me scrambling for the remote to bring it down to half or even quarter volume.
hapticmonkey 21 hours ago [-]
My AppleTV 4K’s “reduce loud sounds” and “enhance dialogue” features have made watching TV at night bearable again.
fainpul 21 hours ago [-]
Yes - I mean not "automatic", but user-adjustable. A video player which allows adjusting the dynamic range, just like you can adjust the volume, would be awesome.
fwip 19 hours ago [-]
Many TVs or speaker systems will have this feature - it's often called something like "night mode."
> a video streaming service that serves consumers residing in the state shall not transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany
I was hoping we'd find a more precise definition. Couldn't this be gamed by editing a short (1 second, for example) segment of the intended content to have loud audio to artificially set the upper bound?
potamic 1 days ago [-]
It does mention compliance with the CALM act, which lays out the precise methodology by which loudness will be measured [1]
> The Calm Act refers to A/85, and A/85:2013
specifies BS.1770 (specifically referencing BS.1770-1) as
the source of its loudness measurement techniques
(1770-2 did not exist at the time A/85 was finalized). So
BS.1770-1 currently serves as the yardstick by which
U.S. television programming will be evaluated for CALM
Act compliance.
> BS.1770 recommends the Leq(RLB) measurement
algorithm, where Leq(W) the frequency weighted sound
level measure, xw is the signal at the output of the
weighting filter, xRef is the reference level, and T is the
length of the audio sequence.
> The drawback of BS.1770 as originally conceived is that
it measures average loudness over the entire length of
content. This may be fine if the loudness is fairly
consistent over time. If not, a quiet section of content
may, as illustrated in Figure 5, bias the average level so
that it measures as acceptable despite having some
sections that are unacceptably loud.
Off topic but I spot another one of those forcibly made acronyms
> Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act of 2010
namibj 1 days ago [-]
Sounds like political ones are exempt?
spike021 1 days ago [-]
i've noticed this with amazon prime in particular it's got to be at least 25% louder than the actual content i'm watching.
nullify88 1 days ago [-]
YouTube does this too. We immediately fetch the remote and mute the damn thing. And I'm contemplating finding something that auto mutes for me.
smoghat 21 hours ago [-]
For us, even regular YouTube is substantially louder than any streamer. If we want to watch something on YT than go back to Hulu/Netflix, we always have to adjust the volume. I don’t get it, why, why?
spike021 15 hours ago [-]
that's odd to me because a lot of the time I've found that regular YouTube content is on the quieter side to other services.
fwip 19 hours ago [-]
Louder content is more compelling (to a point), so I'd imagine that louder content helps boost watchtime, which is what both Youtube and the video creators are optimizing for. The music industry's "loudness war" seems related.
It's already spelled out in more detail in the FCC guidance which the legislation incorporates by reference. Backing down the private right of action is bullshit though.
neves 20 hours ago [-]
Do you manage to block ads from apps? I use streaming devices like Roku or an Android Projector. Do I need my own DNS server with a blocklist? Does it work?
richid 20 hours ago [-]
It's still worth it to block ads at the DNS level but ad platforms are wise to the game and now serve from domains that also serve legitimate content.
spicyusername 20 hours ago [-]
If the ad is embedded in the video DNS blocking does not typically work.
neves 20 hours ago [-]
Sure, but in the world of microservices, maybe it is doable
segmondy 14 hours ago [-]
The sad thing for some of them is that we have developed "ad blindness" if you offer me $1000 to tell you what ad played 2 seconds after an ad, I promise you that I'll fail 99% of the time. My brain just turns them off
sys_64738 21 hours ago [-]
Loud ads were a staple of TV commercials for cars and trucks. Probably to wake you up. The only time I ever have ads I mute the TV and look at the walls. I only see ads during local news broadcasts on OTA TV signal. I adblock on the internet and don't do subscriptions. I rarely see ads which is the right thing. Ads waste your time and 30 secs seeing an ad is 30 secs less you have to live.
hinkley 9 hours ago [-]
SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY AT THE TACOMA DOME!!!
nikolay 9 hours ago [-]
Finally! Bulgarian ads are terrible, too. In fact, the advertisers are beyond stupid, as every time they blast me with their commercial messages and stress me out and hurt my ears, they get banned from my life! Obnoxious marketing does not work in the 21st century!
p0w3n3d 20 hours ago [-]
def commercial():
if location.state() != CALIFORNIA: {
volume += 100
Lumoscore 15 hours ago [-]
Seriously, how is this still a conversation in 2025? It's completely absurd that an entire legislature had to pass a bill (shoutout to California for SB 576, the rest of you take notes) to fix something that is purely an intentional design decision by streaming companies.
The sheer audacity of the industry arguing that it's "technologically too difficult" to match the loudness of an ad to the loudness of the program is an insult to the people who wrote the original CALM Act code ten years ago. They can serve up geo-specific, personalized, real-time ads based on what I ate for dinner last night, but ensuring the audio standard is consistent is where the technology apparently hits a brick wall? Please.
Every time one of those blast-furnace commercials kicks in, it's a perfect encapsulation of how little the streaming platforms respect their paying customers. It’s a deliberate strategy—a final, desperate attempt to shock your brainstem into attention after you've spent an hour in the quiet dynamic range of cinematic dialogue.
I'm not in California, so for now, I'm still relying on my TV's ancient "Night Mode" compressor just to survive the commercial breaks. Hopefully, the rest of the world stops pretending this isn't fixable and applies the same basic standard of decency. Our home theater systems deserve better.
cramcgrab 19 hours ago [-]
I’m glad California is on it. These more they can stick it big tech, the better. Somebody’s got to look out for us.
lionkor 24 hours ago [-]
It's good that regulation is being passed. People here saying it's "sad" that laws need to be made probably miss the point; this is the point of laws.
They exist to ensure things are done right when there's no other incentive to do them right other than "it'd be nice".
neves 20 hours ago [-]
That's what Gov is for. You can't let billionaires behave as they want.
zamalek 21 hours ago [-]
This is trivial to geofence, so I expect this to be one of those that doesn't benefit the whole country.
thrill 9 hours ago [-]
Commercials should have to be done with no audio. Make Mimes Great Again.
palmfacehn 23 hours ago [-]
I thought Netflix was a paid service?
fluidcruft 21 hours ago [-]
They bumped rates and have ad-supported tiers now.
neves 20 hours ago [-]
As Amazon Prime and Disney+
a96 20 hours ago [-]
That doesn't really mean anything, although some people seem to think that it's only free services that can be bad.
palmfacehn 20 hours ago [-]
I would hope that some would have the good sense to stop paying for bad services, but here we are.
hinkley 9 hours ago [-]
Also Netflix:
BABOOOOOOOOONG!!!!
19 hours ago [-]
Esophagus4 21 hours ago [-]
Any way to block ads entirely on streaming services on a smart TV?
Instead of and app I use Brave browser. It blocks YouTube ads
immibis 17 hours ago [-]
I heard that most people use piracy. You shouldn't pirate, though - taking food out of a corporation's mouth is morally inexcusable.
ncr100 16 hours ago [-]
.. because corporations are people. /s
Money is an important societal mechanism. It comes with some steep cons however.
I have no real point to this comment.
jjgreen 21 hours ago [-]
Legalise the hunting of those working in the advertising industry.
everdrive 19 hours ago [-]
>on a smart TV
Best way to avoid advertising when owning a smart TV is to bash your face into to a wall repeatedly until you can non longer perceive anything.
leetrout 20 hours ago [-]
No pass one for accessibility so we can actually hear dialog in the shows.
DoctorOW 1 days ago [-]
I'm honestly surprised that somebody hasn't sold a bundle of a TV antenna, set-top box, and cloud storage for a DIY streaming service kind of thing. I'm aware of Plex and Jellyfin, but I feel like you could make the setup instant and painless even for non-technical users. All these problems we're seeing with streaming (content spread over many expensive subscriptions, unregulated advertising, disappearing/moving content) would be easily solved.
extraduder_ire 24 hours ago [-]
A company tried to do that, but centralising the hardware so you didn't need to hunt for reception. They were sued out of business quickly.
In Italy such devices are known as Pezzotto, because they are like a patch to connect to different streaming, IPTV, etc channels. Of course illegaly.
There was a huge crackdown of both such services providers and their users in the EU (ties between politicians and sports broadcasting lobbies), which was immediately followed with increased pricing from every service, from Sky, DAZN, Mediaset Premium etc to on-demand platforms like Prime, Netflix, Disney Plus, etc.
In addition it seems a cartel has followed up: almost every service has added Ads on top of their lower tier, even though users already paid the increased price in service.
dotnet00 21 hours ago [-]
Plex, as a business, is already in a tough spot because it's mostly used to stream pirated media, and if they make too many overt moves towards making piracy easier, media companies might start going after them.
Thus all the stuff to haphazardly integrate streaming services. Selling it as a preconfigured kit might be risky.
lksaar 21 hours ago [-]
Something like Streamio + Realdebrid?
smoghat 21 hours ago [-]
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11 hours ago [-]
mattmaroon 1 days ago [-]
TVs and streaming devices could, should, and sometimes do fix this as well. I’d pay a little extra for that.
There is no vaccine, no cure once you are exposed to content. Your house will be filled with 300,000+ things and it is impossible to find anything, the fastest way to get your stuff is again amazon same day delivery because you don't have the time to rummage through the hundreds of thousands of things!
21 hours ago [-]
afandian 1 days ago [-]
Now do Duolingo. That ping is _so_ loud.
noisem4ker 23 hours ago [-]
You can disable sound effects (as well as the overdone haptics) in the settings.
afandian 19 hours ago [-]
Good to know!
Too late in my case, between the loud noises and the infantile UX I've long since deleted the app.
Acrobatic_Road 14 hours ago [-]
even better, he could uninstall it.
Jzush 15 hours ago [-]
Good, now do YouTube. That crap wakes me up.
Drunkfoowl 21 hours ago [-]
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revanwjy 22 hours ago [-]
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clayliu 1 days ago [-]
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hermannj314 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 08:39:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.
I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.
Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGD2tjST16V9W8pWMM4bJ...
They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.
With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.
It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.
It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.
I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.
Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.
Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.
I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).
https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...
Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
If we are just measuring viewing of an ad as positive, then obnoxious ads will be viewed and thought to be effective. But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative.
Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
MPC has the ability to normalize volume in a video automatically.
But not the vast majority of consumers.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
> But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative
In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
Frankly, if the volume is too high I think the annoyance would be mostly directed towards the entire service playing ads at all, not the maker of the individual ad.
This really just tells me that either I'm an outlier (probably) or advertisers are morons
If I remember something annoyed me with an ad, I will move heaven and earth to avoid their product
I loathe advertising in general and the more intrusive it is the less I want your product. I keep a shit list of particularly irritating brands and go out of my way to avoid them
I have a related anecdote:
Several years ago there was a huge level of competition among brands to position their Bluetooth speakers at retail stores. The stores had a table or a shelf with a large variety of different speakers, companies competed on price, quality and design, created expensive display racks with buttons to demonstrate the quality of different content, paid the stores fees to put up those display-racks, etc.
Then, JBL decided to reduce the component costs for the speaker and put the money into colorful LEDs instead. Not as an end-user feature, but to grab the attention of the customer at the point-of-sale and stand out from all those other speakers.
This completely disrupted the market, and within 2 months they were the number one brand in Bluetooth speakers in low/mid price-segments. Their Audio quality was lower compared to others in the same tier, but they were the most attention-grabbing speakers in every store, creating the most sales.
Lesson for the entire industry: Cut the BOM for audio-components in the speakers and add LEDs!!
Within a few months the entire Bluetooth-Speaker shelf of all retailers was full of speakers with flashing LEDs...
There is evidence that louder ads work: https://news.nd.edu/news/loud-and-clear-high-energy-ads-keep...
This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
I think the difference between you and I is that I think it is always manipulative, and therefore is always very annoying
There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
Tension somewhere between the usual ad boundaries? Nothing's happening. Tension near the 7 or 10 minute boundaries (depending on 30 or 60 minute shows)? Something's gonna happen.
It makes TV shows predictable even when watched on an ad-free platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure
What I'm talking about is far less visible, if at all, in adless 60-minute runtime episodes.
Edit: and "what I'm talking about" is clear before-the-ad cliffhangers with after-the-ad "rewards" in the form of events that advance the plot.
Like the PEPSI vending machine, brightly lit up and just happened to be there PERFECTLY working order in the middle of an apocalypse to provide a refreshing Pepsi to Brad Pitt at the tense zombie cat-and-mouse moment in World War Z?
https://youtu.be/XzMhRnpTrL0?si=8FqSm_42Cx9sZE4R&t=93
I actively avoid buying things if I keep bumping into their obtrusive ads.
That means Netflix couldn't make any of it's own shows, you wouldn't have each media company with its own streaming service.
Add on top of that standard fees for streaming royalties which were how do I say contract free syndication. As in you don't need to make a deal with a studio, any company can have anything in their streaming library and everybody pays the same fee (maybe with something like a 1 year lockout, but anything made available on one would be required to be available on all).
Then you have a real market for streaming services and productions instead of all of these little monopolies. Consumers get to choose with their wallets instead of tying the art with the corporate policy.
I do. I don’t watch things with ad breaks.
Profit motivated business (i.e. almost all of them) have a fiduciary duty towards the owners or shareholders. They are legally bound to maximize profits at all costs. If they don't do this, the leadership will be found guilty of dereliction of duty and be sanctioned.
Business aren't people, therefore human morality does not apply. Regulations are the only thing that keeps this behaviour in check. It's the nature of the beast unfortunately.
> and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them
It absolutely has a negative outcome for them, there is a post on the front-page of HN right now about how a California law is forcing Netflix and other streaming services to turn down the volume of their ad breaks.
Why did that law not apply to streaming services in the first place? The internet was very much alive and kicking in 2010. Sure, streaming wasn't as prevalent as it is today, but it wouldn't have taken a lot of imagination to see the same problem would become an issue on the internet as well.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bork_tapes#:~:text=On%20Septem...
If anything, the law has given cover to shady walled garden business practices that would not have survived otherwise.
>"thing but on computer"
From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
Why
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
This suggests they were thinking of linear television. Some searching tells me that in fact this is how it was apparently interpreted, for when it was applied to cable TV it was not applied to on-demand cable programming. It was just applied to the regular cable channels.
With linear TV everything is prepared in advance. When they sell an ad slot they know what program they will be showing at the time. There's plenty of time to match the ad volume to the program volume, which I suspect in 2010 could not be reasonably automated.
With on-demand you don't know what programs the ad will be in until the program actually starts. You could potentially be showing that ad in thousands of different programs at approximately the same time. If the level adjustments could not reasonably be completely automated this may have been impractical.
Not really. There's a lot of live programming. Ad campaigns may be cancelled and replaced close to the time of airing. Local stations and cable systems preempt national ads and insert their own ads at times.
The way this was resolved was not by tuning ads to the content they interrupt, it was by setting standard audio levels for all programming and tuning the ads to fit that standard.
Whatever the product is, they will never have me as a customer.
What stopped that, was that TVs and videotape machines looked for loud content, and used that to trigger ad-skipping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
Might be a "chicken/egg" thing.
i want to mute ads when i am watching espn plus. my current tv is fire tv. i guess i'd have to build a little robot arm that presses mute button on the remote?
Even in the show itself, sudden loud bits just send me scrambling for the remote to bring it down to half or even quarter volume.
> a video streaming service that serves consumers residing in the state shall not transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany
I was hoping we'd find a more precise definition. Couldn't this be gamed by editing a short (1 second, for example) segment of the intended content to have loud audio to artificially set the upper bound?
> The Calm Act refers to A/85, and A/85:2013 specifies BS.1770 (specifically referencing BS.1770-1) as the source of its loudness measurement techniques (1770-2 did not exist at the time A/85 was finalized). So BS.1770-1 currently serves as the yardstick by which U.S. television programming will be evaluated for CALM Act compliance.
> BS.1770 recommends the Leq(RLB) measurement algorithm, where Leq(W) the frequency weighted sound level measure, xw is the signal at the output of the weighting filter, xRef is the reference level, and T is the length of the audio sequence.
> The drawback of BS.1770 as originally conceived is that it measures average loudness over the entire length of content. This may be fine if the loudness is fairly consistent over time. If not, a quiet section of content may, as illustrated in Figure 5, bias the average level so that it measures as acceptable despite having some sections that are unacceptably loud.
[1] https://www.telestream.net/pdfs/whitepapers/wp-calm-act-comp...
> Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act of 2010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
The sheer audacity of the industry arguing that it's "technologically too difficult" to match the loudness of an ad to the loudness of the program is an insult to the people who wrote the original CALM Act code ten years ago. They can serve up geo-specific, personalized, real-time ads based on what I ate for dinner last night, but ensuring the audio standard is consistent is where the technology apparently hits a brick wall? Please.
Every time one of those blast-furnace commercials kicks in, it's a perfect encapsulation of how little the streaming platforms respect their paying customers. It’s a deliberate strategy—a final, desperate attempt to shock your brainstem into attention after you've spent an hour in the quiet dynamic range of cinematic dialogue.
I'm not in California, so for now, I'm still relying on my TV's ancient "Night Mode" compressor just to survive the commercial breaks. Hopefully, the rest of the world stops pretending this isn't fixable and applies the same basic standard of decency. Our home theater systems deserve better.
They exist to ensure things are done right when there's no other incentive to do them right other than "it'd be nice".
BABOOOOOOOOONG!!!!
Instead of and app I use Brave browser. It blocks YouTube ads
Money is an important societal mechanism. It comes with some steep cons however.
I have no real point to this comment.
Best way to avoid advertising when owning a smart TV is to bash your face into to a wall repeatedly until you can non longer perceive anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
There was a huge crackdown of both such services providers and their users in the EU (ties between politicians and sports broadcasting lobbies), which was immediately followed with increased pricing from every service, from Sky, DAZN, Mediaset Premium etc to on-demand platforms like Prime, Netflix, Disney Plus, etc.
In addition it seems a cartel has followed up: almost every service has added Ads on top of their lower tier, even though users already paid the increased price in service.
Thus all the stuff to haphazardly integrate streaming services. Selling it as a preconfigured kit might be risky.
There is no vaccine, no cure once you are exposed to content. Your house will be filled with 300,000+ things and it is impossible to find anything, the fastest way to get your stuff is again amazon same day delivery because you don't have the time to rummage through the hundreds of thousands of things!
Too late in my case, between the loud noises and the infantile UX I've long since deleted the app.