CALM Act passed, will quiet loud TV commercials within a year
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Still. Better late than never, I guess.
1. sports -- there is no viable alternative at the moment.
2. Sometimes I just want to veg and channel surf (be passively entertained). There is no good way to do this with online services or recorded stuff.
3. Sometimes I need push infotainment because I don't know about the existence of something to actively pursue interest in it. While HN and Reddit (and so on) are rapidly replacing this niche, there are some things they just don't do well, somethings are just more interesting when presented as a video first, rather than as a link (cooking stuff comes to mind...).
That being said, having the TV on in the background is different than "still watch TV", and I agree, it is a bit annoying and sad.
FCC has received complaints about loud commercials since the 1960s
... that's nice? Are you expecting people to call up their senators and explain the subtleties of audio perception and how the commercial that they just heard exploits the differences between perception and audio level to actually be louder than the primary content without reading any differently on a decibelmeter?
Here's my prediction: this bill will have absolutely no effect other than to make running a television station more expensive.
You can't solve this through legislation because you can't efficiently fine offenders. If you care about the loudness of commercials, stop watching television or start building a commercial solution.
I'm not sure if this will solve things. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Marke...
It helps maintain consistent volume across commercials, different channels, and different input sources. I have a Toshiba Regza TV that's equipped with it and it's great. It was a deciding factor in the purchase of my TV.
It's too bad no one ever made that technology. :(
More on the article, it's nice they're doing this and all, I don't care so much since I don't watch t.v., but I don't think a simple facepalm expresses my feeling that this is about the best our government can do over the past few years when it comes to making the lives of its citizens better.
A few problems with this statement:
- Many people probably feel you are discounting some of the work the government has done over the past few years. The stimulus and healthcare (depending on who you ask) both significantly improved the lives of large sections of the citizenry. And there are probably countless minor laws that fixed various problems that weren't quite as important to you.
- I don't like the assumption that the government's primary role is to make the lives of the people better in ways it is not already doing. This leads to government expansion and often fiscal irresponsibility and economic inefficiency. To put it concretely: a lot of the things you probably believe would "make the lives of [the country's] citizens better" cost money. That is, other people's money, people who might not value these things as much as you do. The government could I'm sure give every citizen a pair of roller skates, and that would "better" the lives of the citizens, but it also has a cost.
People are free to feel I'm discounting the stimulus and the healthcare package, personally I believe those to be insufficient and a mess, whether they will ultimately really improve everyone's situation is still to be seen and debated (elsewhere). I admit I'm likely ignorant on many minor laws that were passed that are useful to certain groups of people.
My assumption on the government making lives better is not that it should come up with more ways to do so, or less ways, but that it should simply focus on the big things and not these little things, which would include giving everyone some rollerblades. I'm also aware that everything has a cost, I don't see how stating that is an argument for anything. Of course government should weigh costs and benefits before rolling out some plan.
More concretely and with respect to this specific problem, it's something the government should keep its hands out of. This problem is easily solved by a free market solution of buying a sophisticated (i.e. capable of distinguishing commercial from program) device to do this for you without failing on the obvious cases (as the top comment suggested), the lack of which suggests it's not all that important a problem in the first place. (And in fact, it seems like advertising is the more significant complaint, which is why things like Netflix and TiVo exist.) Plus a good-enough solution exists already: the mute button. If government should be providing any sort of service to better people's lives, it should be weighted such that only those services which provide the best improvement for the best costs should be implemented. Let's talk about the costs of eliminating national poverty, not making sure everyone with a scraped knee can go to the store and receive a free bandaid.
Edit: (Yes, I also realize that a failure of the free market doesn't mean there's no problem, but in this case, I think there really is no big deal and the government can stay away.)
EditEdit: On the other hand, the government nearly controls public broadcast anyway. Not straight-up censorship controlling but e.g. the recent force-upgrade to digital over analog, the list of words you can't say on public t.v. There are so many issues with this that it's hard to get a clear picture.
Personally, I would try both. Get big things in the pipeline but get as many quick wins as possible. To do as you suggest leaves you in a position of having accomplished literally nothing after years in office.
I think this is probably one of the things the government can do that is unambiguously good and will touch the lives of many, many Americans. It's also an example of a market failure where there is no market for the product or service demanded. It's a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons where the gain on the TV signal is owned by no one and thus not protected. It seems like a perfect thing for the governing bodies of the country to spend time on if that's what it takes to get it done.
I do not buy your theory that this is pandering for votes. I doubt very many people will chose their elected representatives based on this issue. Instead, I think that is just a convenient rhetorical device by which you are discounting the value of this measure.
> Going further, what's the positive national interest in encouraging Americans to watch yet more broadcast television?
Personally I don't think it's in the national interest for the government to decide for its citizens what they ought to be doing with their time. Instead, it should observe what the citizens wish to do and, where appropriate and efficient, facilitate those activities.
I can buy that it's an example of market failure, but I'm not sure about the second part. According to the idealized free-market theory, this sort of stuff should be taken care of by the market just fine, by people changing the channel away from the objectionable ones, thus commercially penalizing them to the point where running quieter ads becomes the right business decision. That doesn't appear to have happened, probably because while people dislike loud TV ads enough to write to the FCC, they don't dislike them enough to actually meaningfully change their TV-watching habits (so channels with quieter ads don't really gain a commercial advantage).
The products are very differentiated, and there are only a few companies providing the products. But the differentiation is really what matters in this case.
As much as everyone hates loud commercials, channels can't actually gain significant viewership by quieting them down--no one is going to watch a drama with quiet commercials when they really want to be watching the football game with loud commercials.
This means that there's no incentive for a channel to piss off their advertisers by doing this on their own.
This is what governments are for--mandating the socially optimal strategy when the dominant strategy is something else.
Calling this a "theory" is giving it more credit than is warranted. It's largely an experienced opinion and the only kind of falsification you can do on it is see if implementing parts of it cause society to implode.
Seems like the manufacturing side might also be a market failure--it's a feature that most/all consumers want but since the market is fiercely price-competitive no manufacturer wants to pay for it. Still, it seems like a feature that Sony/LG/etc could advertise and gain a small amount of market share for.
It's not clear to me what evidence you'd use to show that this was unambiguously good, given that Americans have had the option to buy TVs with this feature for a long time, and mostly don't bother. To me, this would suggest that the assertion that it's an unambiguous good is at least questionable: if it's not worth a few extra dollars, how do we measure "good"?
There's no free rider element here, so I fail to see how this is a textbook case. The temperature at most public places isn't regulated by the government. Is it a tragedy that it's typically colder at the movie theater? No, experience tells you to dress a bit warmer. As with clothing and climate control systems, TV technology gives us the means to control our own environment: volume controls, DVRs that skip commercials, auto-leveling features, etc.
Given how much we can control/regulate our own personal environments, and even to some extent in the marketplace by having merchants cater to our preferences, do we really need this legislation and is it a priority given the current state of affairs?
I hope this will work in the USA.
Someone from Big Advertising a few years ago asserted that skipping commercials, even going to the bathroom during commercial breaks, was stealing, same as piracy. I find it odd that advertisers would actively discourage watching like this.
It contains a method of setting the loudness of a program via a volume control, which is based on some sort of average of the underlying waveform (not peak sample value), and then "recommends" that during changes between program and interstitial content (like advertisements), the same loudness setting be used.
It seems broadly similar to something like Replay Gain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain), which sets volume based on an average that's intended to capture perceived loudness.