Went on Instagram last week for 2-3 days, and found out an annoying pattern where just the beginning 1s or so of a video ad is loud and then the volume is normal. Doesn't occur on all Ads either.
This sounds like automatic gain correction, which is an appropriate solution to this problem. The only thing that IG could be doing better is to calculate the gain on the upcoming 1s instead of the previous. And actually, I would say that the correction should be punitive: if the stream volume crosses a certain threshold, a flat -6dB should be applied on top of the calculated correction.
Well, since loud ads may be going away, I want to share my observations for posterity: Loud ads only annoyed some people. Or rather, some people found them hellishly torturous (mostly neurodivergent people like me) and others were remarkably okay with them (or were just placated by the thought of saving a few dollars a month)
I found this to be an issue on YouTube. It wasn’t necessarily malicious. I often put on a no-talking video in the background while reading and the ad interruptions became really loud. I eventually just ended up subscribing, but this is great to see.
The ads sometimes being loud on YouTube usually doesn't bother me (except recently when it was an extra loud woman shouting something like "My husband fucked me all night last night" and proceeded to extol the virtues of the product that I am supposed to believe allowed for that bedroom performance--that was so annoying and it was so different from the ads they normally show me it earned YouTube a week with the ad blocker on [1]).
What I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.
With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?
[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.
For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.
Why would you willingly turn off ad blocking? Get Youtube Premium if you want channels to get some revenue out of you, but why would choose to get blasted by ads, with these complicated rules. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Voilà, I think you may have fallen for their trap. That's why they've done nothing about this to date even though volume normalisation is a solved problem.
> The groups argued that “many” streaming services were already trying to manage the “loudness of advertisements that come from server-side ad insertion that may be inconsistent with the loudness of the programs,” […]. Server-side ads can have differing volumes due to companies using various encoding pipelines.
Boo-freaking-hoo. Cry me a river, poor streaming services without the technical know-how to calculate an ad’s volume. We can’t expect them to know how audio works!
> Additionally, as the opposing groups previously pointed out, streaming services must contend with a broad range of output devices, including TVs, tablets, and phones.
See, that’s just flat-out lying. What’s this mythical circumstance where playing audio A at the same volume as audio B on one device will magically make A louder than Bon another? Especially when dealing with server-side ad insertion, as the article discusses, where the service has full control of the input files and the output stream? This reads like a restaurant trade group claiming that it’s impossible to know how much salt they put in the gravy.
> See, that’s just flat-out lying. What’s this mythical circumstance where playing audio A at the same volume as audio B on one device will magically make A louder than Bon another? Especially when dealing with server-side ad insertion, as the article discusses, where the service has full control of the input files and the output stream?
Consider a streaming movie with surround sound with an inserted ad that is in stereo. I'm playing it on a 5.1 home theater system and you are playing it on a stereo phone. Your system is mixing the surround sound down to stereo.
When your device does that it applies attenuation to the program so that if several channels in the 5.1 stream have something loud all at the same time it won't be too loud in the down mix for stereo and clip. When the commercial cuts in your device recognizes it is ordinary stereo and it doesn't need to down mix. It goes straight through without the attenuation that down mixer applies to the program.
Whatever level the commercial is really at relative to the program, it is going to sound loader than that on your system because of that attenuation difference.
On my device it is not attenuating the 5.1 program since it has all the necessary channels. However, if the commercial is at the same level as the program it will actually sound louder on mine. That's because the same total level of sound split among 5 speakers perceptually seems less loud than the same total level coming from stereo speakers.
The streamer can do loudness normalization between the program and the commercial. It can calculate what the perceived human loudness will be at any time in the adjust the levels so that on my device the perceived level of the 5.1 program when it gets to the commercial will match the perceived level of the commercial on stereo.
But for devices that are down mixing to stereo there is still going to be the attenuation the down mixers uses, and that differs from device to device. That limits what can be done server side to get the program and commercial to match.
Some multichannel formats do include metadata for the device telling it how much to attenuate when down mixing to stereo. If all the device supported that it should be possible for the server to fully take care of loudness matching. Otherwise you probably need device side normalization.
Another approach would be to up mix the stereo commercial server side to whatever surround sound format the program is using. Then they could do server side loudness normalization between the program and the commercial without it being messed up by the difference in how stereo devices down mix.
I'm not sure why that is generally not done. LLMs are suggesting several reasons but I have no idea if they are reasonable. I'll leave exploring that to someone else.
Considering the number of thick volumes of regulations the world's governments are accumulating in trying to combat harmful behaviour by businesses (or, in economic parlance, negative externalities), and still failing to keep them in check, I wonder whether we should consider bringing back more flexible, socially imposed injunctions instead of legislation/regulation. Something not quite as strict as judge-made law / common law, but also not quite as mob-rule-esque as mass cancellation online. Boycotting is obviously one form. Ostracism was another, but no longer practical. Perhaps there are other methods. Perhaps any business that cannot be effectively boycotted by a majority of its customers, should be considered too big to exist.
Not “instead of” but “in addition to”. Government regulation is not perfect but is the first-best solution to imposing such injunctions, and prima facie is much more effective than social norms or industry self-regulation. That’s a major part of why the industry bodies are objecting to it.
Instagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.
It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.
I blame Apple for that. They've majorly bungled HDR. The worst part is that everyone follows them, so we have a bunch of hardware vendors trying to tie HDR to numbers they can brag about (brightness) while video content producers just want to make dark scenes without banding.
Is there a technical reason why apple doesn’t allow HDR to be selectively turned off? I’m surprised this is still not at least an accessibility option.
> [...] opposed the bill. The groups argued that “many” streaming services were already trying to manage the “loudness of advertisements that come from server-side ad insertion that may be inconsistent with the loudness of the programs,”
Well, stop "trying" and fix it already. It's your own damn system.
I wonder if this means Apple TV will make their show volumes louder finally (aka, standard levels of other apps so I don't need to put my speaker at 39/40 to hear what should be 25/40)
Though, I don't even know if Apple TV has an ad-supported plan. This is mainly wishful thinking here :)
In China, problems like this are usually solved through departmental internal documents, or just through officials directly, privately and orally command.
Passing legislation for this kind of thing is almost impossible. This is the so-called "rule by man".
It is quite an interesting thing to see a country across the ocean solving this kind of problem through law.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] threadWhat I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.
With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?
[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.
For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.
Boo-freaking-hoo. Cry me a river, poor streaming services without the technical know-how to calculate an ad’s volume. We can’t expect them to know how audio works!
> Additionally, as the opposing groups previously pointed out, streaming services must contend with a broad range of output devices, including TVs, tablets, and phones.
See, that’s just flat-out lying. What’s this mythical circumstance where playing audio A at the same volume as audio B on one device will magically make A louder than Bon another? Especially when dealing with server-side ad insertion, as the article discusses, where the service has full control of the input files and the output stream? This reads like a restaurant trade group claiming that it’s impossible to know how much salt they put in the gravy.
Consider a streaming movie with surround sound with an inserted ad that is in stereo. I'm playing it on a 5.1 home theater system and you are playing it on a stereo phone. Your system is mixing the surround sound down to stereo.
When your device does that it applies attenuation to the program so that if several channels in the 5.1 stream have something loud all at the same time it won't be too loud in the down mix for stereo and clip. When the commercial cuts in your device recognizes it is ordinary stereo and it doesn't need to down mix. It goes straight through without the attenuation that down mixer applies to the program.
Whatever level the commercial is really at relative to the program, it is going to sound loader than that on your system because of that attenuation difference.
On my device it is not attenuating the 5.1 program since it has all the necessary channels. However, if the commercial is at the same level as the program it will actually sound louder on mine. That's because the same total level of sound split among 5 speakers perceptually seems less loud than the same total level coming from stereo speakers.
The streamer can do loudness normalization between the program and the commercial. It can calculate what the perceived human loudness will be at any time in the adjust the levels so that on my device the perceived level of the 5.1 program when it gets to the commercial will match the perceived level of the commercial on stereo.
But for devices that are down mixing to stereo there is still going to be the attenuation the down mixers uses, and that differs from device to device. That limits what can be done server side to get the program and commercial to match.
Some multichannel formats do include metadata for the device telling it how much to attenuate when down mixing to stereo. If all the device supported that it should be possible for the server to fully take care of loudness matching. Otherwise you probably need device side normalization.
Another approach would be to up mix the stereo commercial server side to whatever surround sound format the program is using. Then they could do server side loudness normalization between the program and the commercial without it being messed up by the difference in how stereo devices down mix.
I'm not sure why that is generally not done. LLMs are suggesting several reasons but I have no idea if they are reasonable. I'll leave exploring that to someone else.
Two reasons:
Highest quality available for every media. Bluray remuxes are a game changer, when available.
Every media in one app.
Well, stop "trying" and fix it already. It's your own damn system.
Though, I don't even know if Apple TV has an ad-supported plan. This is mainly wishful thinking here :)
Passing legislation for this kind of thing is almost impossible. This is the so-called "rule by man".
It is quite an interesting thing to see a country across the ocean solving this kind of problem through law.