> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
44 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 56.0 ms ] thread> 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?
I actively avoid buying things if I keep bumping into their obtrusive ads.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
Thus all the stuff to haphazardly integrate streaming services. Selling it as a preconfigured kit might be risky.
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.
They exist to ensure things are done right when there's no other incentive to do them right other than "it'd be nice".
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.
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!
What stopped that, was that TVs and videotape machines looked for loud content, and used that to trigger ad-skipping.
Whatever the product is, they will never have me as a customer.