Illinois passed a similar law, giving services more incentive to make ads less booming.
  • SaraTonin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 hours

    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

    • lenocolomo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2 hours

      Depends on if local or hosted. Just that the hosted ones are … usually not filtered.

  • 87Six@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2 hours

    There are people that still get ads on their shows? Ew. Icky.

    • Stormcrow@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2 hours

      I know right? This is 2026, we’re all self-hosting and ad-blocking now! Only sheeple would pay for no ads.

      • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        because this is Lemmy it’s impossible to know if this comment is sarcastic or genuine.

  • brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish
    2 days

    Not in the US, but I’d go even further and ban any ad mimicking an “alerting” kind of sound, especially starting with it.

    Alarms, ringtones, even loud door knocking. Even worse, traffic sounds with car horns (rare, but some still do this shit somehow). I can’t believe some of the ads I get are still legal, deliberately stressing you to get your attention shouldn’t be.

    • Zink@programming.devEnglish
      3 hours

      legal, deliberately stressing you to get your attention shouldn’t be.

      I’m thinking of a couple of entire industries that could be banned or destroyed to help people’s brains.

    • celia@lemmy.todayEnglish
      5 hours

      Those car horn/siren radio ads are worse than Internet clickbait and dangerous. Hate them worse than extra loud ads.

    • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4 hours

      I worked on a crew that took lots of long interstate drives when “We Like to Party” by the Vengaboys was a big radio hit. Every time that goddamned horn blasted in that song when we were on the road, we all frantically looked around to see the big truck that was about to kill us only to realize it was just the stupid Vengabus.

    • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1 day

      I can’t understand how people use any platforms with ads. Any ads are bad, but audio/video ads are the worst. I refuse to use any platform that tries to hijack my attention like that.

    • feetandballs@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1 day

      Punish the brands that do it with boycotts, bad reviews and naming/shaming online. Call out the creative production and call them hacks. That must be why they’re in advertising instead of making something someone would enjoy hearing.

  • teyrnon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1 day

    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.

    • Test_Tickles@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 hours

      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.

    • BlackAura@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      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.

    • scops@reddthat.comEnglish
      2 days

      Imagine paying for ads…

      This is one of those headlines for a problem I had no idea existed

      • Holytimes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2 days

        Use to be a problem on TV too. The same type of laws regulate tv ads.

        And they are still too loud

        • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 day

          TV ads are acceptable, they are strictly limited to -24 LUFS. Streaming media like YouTube enforces -14 LUFS.

          That’s 10 decibels, it’s twice as loud.

          And that’s just the hard cutoff.
          While YouTube will bring down the volume automatically (say, if you upload something with -9 LUFS, it will bring it down to -14), it doesn’t scale up.
          So maybe a conscious creator is uploading at -24, then BOOM ad at -14 and your ears start to bleed.

          This law aims to fix that, by forcing the ads to be at the same volume of the content that’s playing, instead of just being able to blast at full volume.

          • Ghoelian@piefed.socialEnglish
            1 day

            TV ads are not acceptable. that -24 limit is pretty useless if the program you were watching is quiet so you turned up the volume. Besides, even if this weren’t an issue, no targeted ad is acceptable.

      • toddestan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        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.

      • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        I miss when ads were fun and you’d watch the superbowl to see the new California raisins animation and Michael Jackson video.

        Smooth Criminal was amazing the first time it aired. Still great, but the long video blew us away.

    • Whitebrow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      Now we just need to normalize audio between action sequences and normal conversation, that shit hella disproportionate a lot of the time.

      • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.comEnglish
        1 day

        This is why I watch with subtitles. I set the volume based on action scenes, and they are practically whispering in conversations.

      • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        I mean my audio system pulls the dialog into the center channel and puts everything else into the surround so it’s easier to pick out.

        I am shit at picking out a voice in a crowd, so that helps me immeasurably.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
          19 hours

          This should be a nice option, not a necessity. Sound mixing should be done correctly to adapt to the average stereo system with an average sound level by default. Then people who can afford a better setup and an individual house can opt for the mixing that fits their situation.

  • HugeNerd@lemmy.caEnglish
    1 day

    I feel MAD Magazine was already lampooning loud ads in the 1960s… plus ca change

  • Babalugats@feddit.ukEnglish
    2 days

    granny has the audio for her TV shows turned up because she can barely hear them. On the ad break the volume is insane 🙉

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2 days

      This was made illegal decades ago on network and cable television. About time it circled around to streaming.

    • adarza@piefed.caEnglish
      2 days

      one of the reasons i have captions on all the time. so i can keep the volume low enough during the program that the loud(er) advertisements don’t knock me out of my chair… or interrupt my nap.

  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1 day

    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.