Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California
arstechnica.com152 points by speckx 5 hours ago
152 points by speckx 5 hours ago
This was a ridiculous loophole that needed to be closed. FCC has already made this practice illegal over broadcast TV.
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.
I don’t think YouTube normalizes the audio on their videos. I have no idea why, but that could easily become a quiet video that leads into a -16 LUFS ad that blows your ears out.
They have a "stable volume" toggle, actually. I don't see ads, so I don't know whether it works for those.
They do, but as usual with those, it wrecks all the decently mixed videos by making everything the same volume.
Though as those are rare as hen’s teeth, perhaps you might as well.
I have experienced this while listening to classical concertos and to meditation videos.
You don't need to pay YouTube protection money. Get a different browser.
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.
This is the fundamental tension in law making and government in general.
Leaving room for nuance reduces the seeming capriciousness seen in the enforcement of some laws that look heavy-handed when applied strictly, while said underspecification can allow for abuse instead.
As long as people are individuals with their own volition this tension will exist.
> 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.
The group includes Netflix, the most technically capable streaming company. It's sad that companies will only go down kicking and screaming even for the mildest of regulations
Yeah. If I had to do this, there’s the likelihood I’d screw it up. I am not Netflix, who quite good at the whole streaming video thing. I find it very hard to believe there are technical challenges in this law that Netflix couldn’t possibly solve.
It's arguably a good strategy to make mountains out of mole hills from their perspective. It drains the regulators' finite resources on relatively trivial matters, and I think it goes without saying there are less trivial and more egregious exploits continuing, more unchecked now as a result.
TL;DR distract the enemy with resource sinks
I think the point is that when you don’t control the ad, it’s a bit tough to normalize its audio. And controlling the ad means bringing ad serving in house, which while possible, is a huge engineering ask.
I guess the solution is to switch to a proper ad insertion company that normalizes to -24 like you’re supposed to, but that’s not cake either. Especially if contracts are signed.
I assume that they also have mechanisms to check that the content itself is legal to broadcast. Checking the loudness and rejecting based on them in that process should be trivial.
If you're streaming the audio waveform, you can calculate the peak volume and adjust the gain.
Most streaming audio already share the same peak volume. The problem is compression. You can compress the hell out of audio, make it sound extremely loud, and it will still have the same peak volume as uncompressed audio.
Well maybe then they should have done quality control. We’ve gotta stop making excuses for these companies that are making money hand over fist.
They might have to hire some people and create some jobs...
Oh, the humanity...
I hate loud ads as well as anyone else and I welcome this resolution but I would not treat the challenges regulation poses as simplisticly as this. There is a lot of research in increasing loudness without increasing decibels, especially for concerts, but it migrated to ads when tv started adding automatic volume controls to normalize across services.
> 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?
Regarding your second point: as any audio engineer or electronic musician knows, the same exact audio absolutely will sound very different on different speakers, depending on how well they replicate various sounds, what level of gain is being applied, and the volume (which is different from gain, although people confuse the two).
That's even before you get into the fact that many modern devices, like smartphones, will apply their own compression or sound processing before playing the sound, sometimes to compensate for those deficiencies and make them less noticeable, and sometimes to "enhance" the sound.
Loudness/volume (technically different things but let's conflate them here) are also unintuitive because human ears don't have a flat frequency response curve, and some things will be perceived as louder despite being the same volume, or vice versa.
Advertisers actually can (and do) take advantage of this, by using sound engineering to make things feel louder while staying within the desired volume, by targeting the way humans perceive the sound.
This isn't a defense of the advertising/streaming companies here, because it is a solvable problem. But it is true that this is a problem that they need to solve.
All that’s true, but those factors affect all the audio similarly. The article specifically talks about server-side ad insertion, so it’s not like the case where it somehow uses the device’s .mov codec to play the content and an MP3 codec to play the ad. All ffmpeg (most likely) knows is that it’s decoding one long stream, and doesn’t switch audio pipelines mid-stream when it thinks it might be playing an ad at that moment.
Regarding the perceptual volume differences: while true, that’s also a solvable problem. Output volumes can be calculated using standard curves. In any case, TV broadcasters have had to figure all this out years ago.
> those factors affect all the audio similarly... Output volumes can be calculated using standard curves... TV broadcasters have had to figure all this out years ago.
Sorry, but all of that is obtuse. The fact that some digital audio can be perceived as much louder than others –– yet it's all limited to the same digital range –– proves they aren't similar at all.
There is no such thing as a standard curve for compression. Source levels vary almost infinitely. Accurately separating and reducing sound after the fact, without turning the whole thing to mud, is considered to be an impossible technical challenge.
Next, TV broadcasters worked on a predetermined schedule with predetermined advertising. This gave them time to inspect and approve ads in advance.
Streaming ads are generally served just in time from third-party services to the streaming host. FFMPEG gets the output from the stream host, but the host has to combine content together from multiple sources (entertainment + multiple ad servers) into that single stream. Currently, sound-level is completely at the whim of each ad server, as well as each ad producer. Meanwhile, the final output is at the whim of the streaming host: 24-hour-news streaming sites probably have different audio standards than Apple TV+.
Ultimately, AI could potentially be used to solve it, since it can generate / make-up new sounds as part of reverse-compression. But it would still have to be done in advance by the third-party ad servers.
None of this is true. There are standard curves for human hearing frequency response and you can use these to compare sound A’s volume to sound B. And since sound compression is in DCT space, you can calculate those numbers very quickly with something similar to sum(vol(f) * curve(f) for f in encoded_frequencies).
I read the article. It specifically talks about server-side ad embedding, i.e. where the service is inserting ad content into the streams, and therefore, by definition, has access to the ad content. They can do the calculations on their end during the embedding process and normalize volumes there before transmitting the result. To make things even easier, they don’t have to calculate the ad volume each time one’s streamed, just once per ad they’re going to serve.
And finally, all of this is a solved problem for TV broadcasters. They face the same problems: advertisers send them content to air, then the broadcasters are legally required to normalize the ad vs content volume, and they do. If this is an insurmountable problem that the streaming services face, they can drive over to their nearest TV station and ask them how they manage to pull off this technological feat.
It definitely isn’t simple, but it’s a pretty well trod path. If the FCC or state equivalent doesn’t have folks who can write the spec that’s a huge problem. I would be surprised if an existing spec doesn’t already exist that just needs to be applied to this scenario.
The streamers should be responsible for the signal. If the device front end has crazy frequency response or the backend does weird DSP tricks, that’s on the device manufacturers.
I guess in the interim, while they try to work it out, they'll just have to make sure it's quieter.
Start at 1/4 the volume they use now.
After all, they don't need to approach compliance tuning and debugging from the loud side. They can start at a whisper and work up.
(I hope they get fined into bankruptcy, if they try to claim they're "working on it", but do so from the loud side.)
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.
Even if I was a billionaire, Stremio gives me a better experience streaming movies and shows then I could get paying for anything and everything.
Two reasons:
Highest quality available for every media. Bluray remuxes are a game changer, when available.
Every media in one app.
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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)
My parents used to have the TV on, blaring, all day long. The ads back then were loud too.
They liked the "background noise". They'd read with it on, have conversations shouting over it, and so on. Baffled me. I often wondered, why not just plop down a food blender and leave it on?
Why pay for cable?!
My parents were never this bad, but I've experienced this with parents of friends and partners. A lot of people seem to crave structure. They don't want to have to think about what to do and have non-existent conversational ability. The TV gives them the structure they need. The schedule always provides a talking point or just something to zone out on when there's a lull.
Mindless scrolling is the modern version of this, but it's worse because there isn't even a shared experience that might spur a conversation.
People like you and me are quite the opposite: we hate external structure and long to be left to our own thoughts and devices. It's not too dissimilar to micromanagement in that respect. What's the point of having a brain (and the rest of the body, that matter) if you can't use it?
I just use Spotify premium how do you get feee music with ads??
My YTMusic App is patched with Revanced(/Morphe), Ublock Origin on browser takes care when I'm on Computer.
I also self-host Navidrome in my homeserver.