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.
We do apply the same measure, adblocking. Except since companies base their businesses on ads theres a cat and mouse game at play to ensure you pay them with your attention. I'm reminded of the scene in "Airplane" where the captain is fighting off sales people in the airport. I feel the same way about the Internet.
My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.
I've noticed that I got Pavolved and whenever I hear things like "But first" or "This is where I'd like to tell you about" I immediately rush to the keyboard, expecting a sponsor segment I should skip.
During baseball games I've come to get annoyed when I hear the announcer stop talking and take a breath, about to change their tone of voice from conversational to formal so they can launch into one of the micro ad reads between pitches or at-bats.
It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.
It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.
I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.
Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.
Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.
I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).
Some German publishers used to to that for books too, apparently. I've heard at least of cases of it happening to Terry Pratchet and Iain Banks (possibly because they wrote SF/F, which as we all know is not real literature).
Maybe its possible to feed everything in to a model that can identify the situation or context in audio or video and block a section out because its an ad. We would not be short of training material.
Latency would have to be low enough to be attractive to users.
Radio shows and ballgames have been doing that for literally decades. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be bothered by it. Frankly, the better announcers don't "change their tone," they just read the ad blurb conversationally and move on.
Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
It doesn't have to auto-skip, it can e.g. just mark the different types of segments for you to make the call to skip or not. You can also still manually seek to any part of a video (even with auto-skipping enabled).
In the UK the TV would show moving black and white stripes in the corner of the screen before a commercial break. If you were recording the programme, you could pause the recording during the adverts.
I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.
Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:
Viewers thought of them as that, and in popular culture that is what cue dots are remembered as today, especially by the Map Men, but technically that is not what cue dots were.
They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.
With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.
I doubt if the ads are working better. I suspect their measurement approaches related to ads effectiveness is wrong.
If we are just measuring viewing of an ad as positive, then obnoxious ads will be viewed and thought to be effective. But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative.
I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior. In the end, platforms like Netflix and Hulu don't need to prove that a higher volume works, but perhaps their customers think that it works, and that is enough.
> I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior.
Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
Unfortunately that's not how human attention works. Being annoyed (or really having any strong emotional reaction) causes the ad to have a stronger impression on your memory. Now pair that with "autopilot mode" while shopping and you have a desirable (for the business) outcome.
My personal little doomsday theory is that the entirety of the advertising industry is built on faulty data. Approximately no one has the complete data set to determine how much an ad is worth. For direct ads ("enter promo code BLAH", "Click Here to check out the new...", there's hard data. But most of the perceived value of advertising is different: The company buying the ads has zero chance of knowing if someone seeing a car ad on YouTube 6 months ago factored into their decision to purchase a different car by the same manufacturer. Maybe the advertising platform has a chance of knowing (though Google AdSense has never asked me for my sales data), but they are strongly motivated to never reveal any results that would damage their industry. The platforms that serve the ads have no reason to thoroughly vet whether ad impressions are being accurately measured because error is almost always in their favor.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
I tend to believe this is some form of Goodhart's law running amok, but when I see obnoxious ads converting I have to wonder if the emotional response eventually boils off leaving behind that sweet sweet brand awareness.
I'd say the metric is simply "if it's suddenly louder than the content before, we have the users attention and eyeballs".
> But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative
In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
Frankly, if the volume is too high I think the annoyance would be mostly directed towards the entire service playing ads at all, not the maker of the individual ad.
> In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
This really just tells me that either I'm an outlier (probably) or advertisers are morons
If I remember something annoyed me with an ad, I will move heaven and earth to avoid their product
I loathe advertising in general and the more intrusive it is the less I want your product. I keep a shit list of particularly irritating brands and go out of my way to avoid them
Yeah, one would think that it works the same for everyone, but in fact it helps to be attention-grabbing, regardless of how.
I have a related anecdote:
Several years ago there was a huge level of competition among brands to position their Bluetooth speakers at retail stores. The stores had a table or a shelf with a large variety of different speakers, companies competed on price, quality and design, created expensive display racks with buttons to demonstrate the quality of different content, paid the stores fees to put up those display-racks, etc.
Then, JBL decided to reduce the component costs for the speaker and put the money into colorful LEDs instead. Not as an end-user feature, but to grab the attention of the customer at the point-of-sale and stand out from all those other speakers.
This completely disrupted the market, and within 2 months they were the number one brand in Bluetooth speakers in low/mid price-segments. Their Audio quality was lower compared to others in the same tier, but they were the most attention-grabbing speakers in every store, creating the most sales.
Lesson for the entire industry: Cut the BOM for audio-components in the speakers and add LEDs!!
Within a few months the entire Bluetooth-Speaker shelf of all retailers was full of speakers with flashing LEDs...
Personally I feel like keeping a list of annoying ad brands and avoiding them would take up too much of my mental space, and it would lead me occasionally to bad purchasing decisions. Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying, but basically all companies have to do it and they tend to do what works and behave similarly. As long as I have a choice, I’ll avoid advertising in general, regardless of whether it’s annoying.
This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
I could agree that advertising is ‘always manipulative’ in the sense that, of course, it always seeks to sell you something and hope you’re swayed into buying. Most of it isn’t secretly or overtly manipulative, most of it is someone saying out loud “here’s my thing, buy it”.
> There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
That’s a step too far, IMO, and before saying that you should at least reflect on how some advertising somewhere likely benefits you. There are many kinds of advertising. Advertising is not necessarily dishonest. If you work for a for-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a non-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a government agency, your org probably advertises. Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
We are chatting on the website of a venture capital company. This very forum you’re using is a subtle advertisement, and a significant portion of the chatter here is about how to start a company, including marketing and advertising. The type of ad/marketing that HN is is neither annoying nor manipulative.
If you ever start your own company - and I recommend it - that’s when you learn the fact that advertising is both absolutely necessary and fairly difficult to do well. If you ever do anything in public, announcing it is advertising. The vast majority of companies advertise, as do many government and non-profit and public-interest organizations, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Advertising is a huge part of the business model that funds the arts in the US, and without it, we’d have a lot fewer plays, dancing, and music.
> Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
Sure, let's discuss.
I cannot agree. Even if it isn't necessarily wrong, that's not strictly correct either. I'll call it a generalization well past the point of not being useful.
Reading several dictionaries' definitions of "marketing" and "advertising", there is room between them, with advertising focusing on paid placement in every one. The American Marketing Association says: "Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting and meeting customer needs. Advertising is a business practice where a company pays to place its messaging or branding in a particular location." https://www.ama.org/marketing-vs-advertising/
Yet "paid" isn't enough, and not only because of the common phrase "paid advertisement". A more accurate distinction might be made with intent. Perhaps: an advertisement is intended to change a viewer's trajectory to the advertiser's desired outcome when the viewer is not already heading in that direction. This is not completely satisfactory.
I believe most people would find it a little off or burying the lede, though not necessarily wrong, to hear, "https://adobe.com/photoshop is advertising for Photoshop", in a way they wouldn't if "promotes" was used instead. I believe most would have a similar impression, "that's a rather weird way to phrase it", if you were to say a business is advertising in the phone book when they are only listed by name, address, and number -- the most basic listing.
Sorry for the mini rant but... One of the things that annoy me about TV shows is that the pacing on shows that were designed for network TV with ads is so predictable you can know whenever a tense scene is going to have an interesting outcome or not.
Tension somewhere between the usual ad boundaries? Nothing's happening. Tension near the 7 or 10 minute boundaries (depending on 30 or 60 minute shows)? Something's gonna happen.
It makes TV shows predictable even when watched on an ad-free platform.
> all companies and products that interrupt a tense scene
reply
Like the PEPSI vending machine, brightly lit up and just happened to be there PERFECTLY working order in the middle of an apocalypse to provide a refreshing Pepsi to Brad Pitt at the tense zombie cat-and-mouse moment in World War Z?
AFAIK even annoying people with ads still makes them more likely to buy your product. Even making people think "ugh, I'll never buy that" still makes them more likely to buy that. They do this stuff because it works. Even if you think it doesn't work, it still works.
Whether or not this actually turns into purchases, I would imagine that obnoxious == memorable, and therefore advertising companies believe more memorable ads will turn into more purchases.
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 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.
> 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.
The Internet, and before it, computers, broke our legal system. There are loads of things that we decided were bad and banned, but "thing but on computer" or "thing but online" somehow were interpreted to be exempt.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.
The video store example is funny because iirc, it wasn’t until someone high up/very involved in government got bit by it. During Robert Bork’s failed Supreme Court confirmation, a reporter figured out he rented porn. Maybe it was something less raunchy / embarrassing than porn but either way, iirc, they got that law on the books fast after that….
The leak was inspired by Bork's opposition to privacy protections beyond those explicitly outlined in the constitution. [0]
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. [1]
The VPPA very much applies to online entities. Netflix can collect all the info it wants about you, but is very much limited in what it can share with external parties.
If anything, the law has given cover to shady walled garden business practices that would not have survived otherwise.
You read wrongly. The 2013 amendment merely allowed customers to consent to disclosure electronically via the Internet. Before then, it had to be in writing. It didn't change 18 USC § 2710's explicit application only to a "video tape service provider", and that is how the law still reads today.
I think until now, the only real thing preserving these consumer protections (and civil rights, while we're at it) was simply the practical difficulty of collecting and compiling that information. Now it's trivial and effortless to collect this information. The old laws still apply, but now the rubber meets the road in actually having them enforced.
>"thing but on computer"
From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
How about liability for publishers? New York Times publishes something damaging and false? Liable! YouTube publishes something damaging and false but since they did it with a computer they're immune!
Now that youtube and meta and tiktok choose what is put in front of you they are the publishers. But the law, passed for the early web, is stuck in the past.
Congratulations, you fell victim to the 'platform vs publisher' liability misinformation. It doesn't work like that and has never worked like that, nor should it except for the perfidious pushers of that misinformation.
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
If a librarian put a book out on the front table with a "recommended reading" sign then yeah that seems fair for them to carry some liability if that book were actually libelous. And so it should be for recommended posts on sites like Youtube, Instagram, etc. A chronological or alphabetical index is a factual catalogue of information. A recommendation is you vouching for the material. Totally different.
> Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
It worked like that before they changed the law and it can work like that again.
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
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.
> 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.
Not really. There's a lot of live programming. Ad campaigns may be cancelled and replaced close to the time of airing. Local stations and cable systems preempt national ads and insert their own ads at times.
The way this was resolved was not by tuning ads to the content they interrupt, it was by setting standard audio levels for all programming and tuning the ads to fit that standard.
Yeah you calculate ReplayGain metadata for the media and let the playback client do normalization to a target level. Unless it's live streaming, pre-calculating gain levels is a non-issue. All the CD ripping/music library software in the 00s already did this because of the loudness war.
The US government typically doesn't try to preemptively regulate things (which is getting to be a problem as it now is too sclerotic to respond quickly to developments). Streaming services in 2010 were mostly paid subscriptions with no ads, I don't think the idea was on anyone's mind.
YouTube existed in 2010, and was primarily supported by ADs. Sure at the time it didn't really show what would traditionally be considered television, but it seems like the same logic would apply.
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.
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.
Google has also decided it is somehow appropriate to run commercial break length ads now for low production quality/budget user generated content. If I watch a dude filming himself with his phone explain how to best change a bike tire, should I be bombarded with ads similar to the nightly news? Nice value proposition
To be fair, Youtube Premium subscription is very affordable and lets you have an ad-free experience. I reward services if they offer ad-free versions for a reasonable price.
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.
> 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 does mention compliance with the CALM act, which lays out the precise methodology by which loudness will be measured [1]
> The Calm Act refers to A/85, and A/85:2013
specifies BS.1770 (specifically referencing BS.1770-1) as
the source of its loudness measurement techniques
(1770-2 did not exist at the time A/85 was finalized). So
BS.1770-1 currently serves as the yardstick by which
U.S. television programming will be evaluated for CALM
Act compliance.
> BS.1770 recommends the Leq(RLB) measurement
algorithm, where Leq(W) the frequency weighted sound
level measure, xw is the signal at the output of the
weighting filter, xRef is the reference level, and T is the
length of the audio sequence.
> The drawback of BS.1770 as originally conceived is that
it measures average loudness over the entire length of
content. This may be fine if the loudness is fairly
consistent over time. If not, a quiet section of content
may, as illustrated in Figure 5, bias the average level so
that it measures as acceptable despite having some
sections that are unacceptably loud.
For us, even regular YouTube is substantially louder than any streamer. If we want to watch something on YT than go back to Hulu/Netflix, we always have to adjust the volume. I don’t get it, why, why?
Louder content is more compelling (to a point), so I'd imagine that louder content helps boost watchtime, which is what both Youtube and the video creators are optimizing for. The music industry's "loudness war" seems related.
It's already spelled out in more detail in the FCC guidance which the legislation incorporates by reference. Backing down the private right of action is bullshit though.
Yes - I mean not "automatic", but user-adjustable. A video player which allows adjusting the dynamic range, just like you can adjust the volume, would be awesome.
is there a programmable tv that i can do something like this ?
i want to mute ads when i am watching espn plus. my current tv is fire tv. i guess i'd have to build a little robot arm that presses mute button on the remote?
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.
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?
The sad thing for some of them is that we have developed "ad blindness" if you offer me $1000 to tell you what ad played 2 seconds after an ad, I promise you that I'll fail 99% of the time. My brain just turns them off
Seriously, how is this still a conversation in 2025? It's completely absurd that an entire legislature had to pass a bill (shoutout to California for SB 576, the rest of you take notes) to fix something that is purely an intentional design decision by streaming companies.
The sheer audacity of the industry arguing that it's "technologically too difficult" to match the loudness of an ad to the loudness of the program is an insult to the people who wrote the original CALM Act code ten years ago. They can serve up geo-specific, personalized, real-time ads based on what I ate for dinner last night, but ensuring the audio standard is consistent is where the technology apparently hits a brick wall? Please.
Every time one of those blast-furnace commercials kicks in, it's a perfect encapsulation of how little the streaming platforms respect their paying customers. It’s a deliberate strategy—a final, desperate attempt to shock your brainstem into attention after you've spent an hour in the quiet dynamic range of cinematic dialogue.
I'm not in California, so for now, I'm still relying on my TV's ancient "Night Mode" compressor just to survive the commercial breaks. Hopefully, the rest of the world stops pretending this isn't fixable and applies the same basic standard of decency. Our home theater systems deserve better.
Finally! Bulgarian ads are terrible, too. In fact, the advertisers are beyond stupid, as every time they blast me with their commercial messages and stress me out and hurt my ears, they get banned from my life! Obnoxious marketing does not work in the 21st century!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
We do apply the same measure, adblocking. Except since companies base their businesses on ads theres a cat and mouse game at play to ensure you pay them with your attention. I'm reminded of the scene in "Airplane" where the captain is fighting off sales people in the airport. I feel the same way about the Internet.
My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.
I've noticed that I got Pavolved and whenever I hear things like "But first" or "This is where I'd like to tell you about" I immediately rush to the keyboard, expecting a sponsor segment I should skip.
During baseball games I've come to get annoyed when I hear the announcer stop talking and take a breath, about to change their tone of voice from conversational to formal so they can launch into one of the micro ad reads between pitches or at-bats.
It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.
Ads have become integrated into everything.
It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.
I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.
Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.
Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.
I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).
Some German publishers used to to that for books too, apparently. I've heard at least of cases of it happening to Terry Pratchet and Iain Banks (possibly because they wrote SF/F, which as we all know is not real literature).
https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...
"But not in dreams, no sirree".
Maybe its possible to feed everything in to a model that can identify the situation or context in audio or video and block a section out because its an ad. We would not be short of training material. Latency would have to be low enough to be attractive to users.
I gave up on audio books because of the unstoppable audible plug at the end of the book. If there are ads the content has to be really compelling.
Radio shows and ballgames have been doing that for literally decades. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be bothered by it. Frankly, the better announcers don't "change their tone," they just read the ad blurb conversationally and move on.
Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.
Sponsorblock took care of that for me
I don't know, I'm just afraid of sponsorblock accidentally skipping a part of the video I'm interested in
It doesn't have to auto-skip, it can e.g. just mark the different types of segments for you to make the call to skip or not. You can also still manually seek to any part of a video (even with auto-skipping enabled).
Thus far it has always been right for me, but you can tweak the settings to offer you a manual skip if you prefer to lean into it more slowly.
Also „Have you ever”.
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In the UK the TV would show moving black and white stripes in the corner of the screen before a commercial break. If you were recording the programme, you could pause the recording during the adverts.
I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.
Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGD2tjST16V9W8pWMM4bJ...
Viewers thought of them as that, and in popular culture that is what cue dots are remembered as today, especially by the Map Men, but technically that is not what cue dots were.
They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.
With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.
I doubt if the ads are working better. I suspect their measurement approaches related to ads effectiveness is wrong.
If we are just measuring viewing of an ad as positive, then obnoxious ads will be viewed and thought to be effective. But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative.
I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior. In the end, platforms like Netflix and Hulu don't need to prove that a higher volume works, but perhaps their customers think that it works, and that is enough.
> I think there's so much snake oil in the ad business because it is indeed hard to measure the effectiveness of ads, in particular when shown in places where you cannot track the user behavior and correlate the ad with subsequent user behavior.
Or the alternative, you can track it therefore you assign a disproportionate amount of value to it versus the things that are harder to track.
This service problem is fixed like most media-related service problems. Sailing.
MPC has the ability to normalize volume in a video automatically.
Unfortunately that's not how human attention works. Being annoyed (or really having any strong emotional reaction) causes the ad to have a stronger impression on your memory. Now pair that with "autopilot mode" while shopping and you have a desirable (for the business) outcome.
I still avoid some products because their maker paid the local version of the insufferable Simon Cowell to promote their products.
YOU still avoid.
But not the vast majority of consumers.
My personal little doomsday theory is that the entirety of the advertising industry is built on faulty data. Approximately no one has the complete data set to determine how much an ad is worth. For direct ads ("enter promo code BLAH", "Click Here to check out the new...", there's hard data. But most of the perceived value of advertising is different: The company buying the ads has zero chance of knowing if someone seeing a car ad on YouTube 6 months ago factored into their decision to purchase a different car by the same manufacturer. Maybe the advertising platform has a chance of knowing (though Google AdSense has never asked me for my sales data), but they are strongly motivated to never reveal any results that would damage their industry. The platforms that serve the ads have no reason to thoroughly vet whether ad impressions are being accurately measured because error is almost always in their favor.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
I tend to believe this is some form of Goodhart's law running amok, but when I see obnoxious ads converting I have to wonder if the emotional response eventually boils off leaving behind that sweet sweet brand awareness.
I'd say the metric is simply "if it's suddenly louder than the content before, we have the users attention and eyeballs".
> But the emotional response would be the opposite (getting annoyed instead of getting interested). I think for the company placing the ad it is a net negative
In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
Frankly, if the volume is too high I think the annoyance would be mostly directed towards the entire service playing ads at all, not the maker of the individual ad.
> In Advertising, "getting annoyed" is just a sub-metric of "getting remembered" ;)
This really just tells me that either I'm an outlier (probably) or advertisers are morons
If I remember something annoyed me with an ad, I will move heaven and earth to avoid their product
I loathe advertising in general and the more intrusive it is the less I want your product. I keep a shit list of particularly irritating brands and go out of my way to avoid them
Yeah, one would think that it works the same for everyone, but in fact it helps to be attention-grabbing, regardless of how.
I have a related anecdote:
Several years ago there was a huge level of competition among brands to position their Bluetooth speakers at retail stores. The stores had a table or a shelf with a large variety of different speakers, companies competed on price, quality and design, created expensive display racks with buttons to demonstrate the quality of different content, paid the stores fees to put up those display-racks, etc.
Then, JBL decided to reduce the component costs for the speaker and put the money into colorful LEDs instead. Not as an end-user feature, but to grab the attention of the customer at the point-of-sale and stand out from all those other speakers.
This completely disrupted the market, and within 2 months they were the number one brand in Bluetooth speakers in low/mid price-segments. Their Audio quality was lower compared to others in the same tier, but they were the most attention-grabbing speakers in every store, creating the most sales.
Lesson for the entire industry: Cut the BOM for audio-components in the speakers and add LEDs!!
Within a few months the entire Bluetooth-Speaker shelf of all retailers was full of speakers with flashing LEDs...
Personally I feel like keeping a list of annoying ad brands and avoiding them would take up too much of my mental space, and it would lead me occasionally to bad purchasing decisions. Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying, but basically all companies have to do it and they tend to do what works and behave similarly. As long as I have a choice, I’ll avoid advertising in general, regardless of whether it’s annoying.
There is evidence that louder ads work: https://news.nd.edu/news/loud-and-clear-high-energy-ads-keep...
This feel unsurprising to me given the long known fact that people tend to rate audio quality based on volume. (It’s what the stereo sales scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was based on.)
> Advertising is what it is, sometimes manipulative and sometimes very annoying
I think the difference between you and I is that I think it is always manipulative, and therefore is always very annoying
There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
I could agree that advertising is ‘always manipulative’ in the sense that, of course, it always seeks to sell you something and hope you’re swayed into buying. Most of it isn’t secretly or overtly manipulative, most of it is someone saying out loud “here’s my thing, buy it”.
> There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.
That’s a step too far, IMO, and before saying that you should at least reflect on how some advertising somewhere likely benefits you. There are many kinds of advertising. Advertising is not necessarily dishonest. If you work for a for-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a non-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a government agency, your org probably advertises. Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
We are chatting on the website of a venture capital company. This very forum you’re using is a subtle advertisement, and a significant portion of the chatter here is about how to start a company, including marketing and advertising. The type of ad/marketing that HN is is neither annoying nor manipulative.
If you ever start your own company - and I recommend it - that’s when you learn the fact that advertising is both absolutely necessary and fairly difficult to do well. If you ever do anything in public, announcing it is advertising. The vast majority of companies advertise, as do many government and non-profit and public-interest organizations, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Advertising is a huge part of the business model that funds the arts in the US, and without it, we’d have a lot fewer plays, dancing, and music.
> Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.
Sure, let's discuss.
I cannot agree. Even if it isn't necessarily wrong, that's not strictly correct either. I'll call it a generalization well past the point of not being useful.
Reading several dictionaries' definitions of "marketing" and "advertising", there is room between them, with advertising focusing on paid placement in every one. The American Marketing Association says: "Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting and meeting customer needs. Advertising is a business practice where a company pays to place its messaging or branding in a particular location." https://www.ama.org/marketing-vs-advertising/
Yet "paid" isn't enough, and not only because of the common phrase "paid advertisement". A more accurate distinction might be made with intent. Perhaps: an advertisement is intended to change a viewer's trajectory to the advertiser's desired outcome when the viewer is not already heading in that direction. This is not completely satisfactory.
I believe most people would find it a little off or burying the lede, though not necessarily wrong, to hear, "https://adobe.com/photoshop is advertising for Photoshop", in a way they wouldn't if "promotes" was used instead. I believe most would have a similar impression, "that's a rather weird way to phrase it", if you were to say a business is advertising in the phone book when they are only listed by name, address, and number -- the most basic listing.
I don't mind ads in the beginning of movies, but I hate with my full heart all companies and products that interrupt a tense scene
Sorry for the mini rant but... One of the things that annoy me about TV shows is that the pacing on shows that were designed for network TV with ads is so predictable you can know whenever a tense scene is going to have an interesting outcome or not.
Tension somewhere between the usual ad boundaries? Nothing's happening. Tension near the 7 or 10 minute boundaries (depending on 30 or 60 minute shows)? Something's gonna happen.
It makes TV shows predictable even when watched on an ad-free platform.
I think that is bumping into the standard three-act structure common in fictional narratives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure
Maybe if you consider that the "three-act" structure is forced onto 20 and 40 minute runtime shows at precise time windows.
What I'm talking about is far less visible, if at all, in adless 60-minute runtime episodes.
Edit: and "what I'm talking about" is clear before-the-ad cliffhangers with after-the-ad "rewards" in the form of events that advance the plot.
> all companies and products that interrupt a tense scene reply
Like the PEPSI vending machine, brightly lit up and just happened to be there PERFECTLY working order in the middle of an apocalypse to provide a refreshing Pepsi to Brad Pitt at the tense zombie cat-and-mouse moment in World War Z?
https://youtu.be/XzMhRnpTrL0?si=8FqSm_42Cx9sZE4R&t=93
AFAIK even annoying people with ads still makes them more likely to buy your product. Even making people think "ugh, I'll never buy that" still makes them more likely to buy that. They do this stuff because it works. Even if you think it doesn't work, it still works.
Whether or not this actually turns into purchases, I would imagine that obnoxious == memorable, and therefore advertising companies believe more memorable ads will turn into more purchases.
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.
>But we don't seem to apply the same measure to ads.
I actively avoid buying things if I keep bumping into their obtrusive ads.
> 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.
I do. I don’t watch things with ad breaks.
> 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.
> 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.
The Internet, and before it, computers, broke our legal system. There are loads of things that we decided were bad and banned, but "thing but on computer" or "thing but online" somehow were interpreted to be exempt.
For instance, there's a law banning video rental stores from sharing customer records, because it's obviously bad if private entities are allowed to collect and use potentially private information like media consumption habits. But movie streaming? Every detail about every piece of media you read or watch, when you watch, when you pause or bounce, every interaction and speck of attention catalogued and actively used to guide consumer behavior? That's fine actually, totally allowed.
How about copyright? Right of first sale dictates that you can do whatever you want with a purchased copy of some media, short of distributing copies. You can give it away, sell it, lend it out, modify it, make personal copies, whatever. But what about "media but on computer"? That all goes out the window. Oh, you don't own a copy, you just have a non-transferable limited license to view that media on a specific device for as long as the distributor doesn't change their minds. An insane legal fiction that magically nullifies hard-won rights.
The video store example is funny because iirc, it wasn’t until someone high up/very involved in government got bit by it. During Robert Bork’s failed Supreme Court confirmation, a reporter figured out he rented porn. Maybe it was something less raunchy / embarrassing than porn but either way, iirc, they got that law on the books fast after that….
The leak was inspired by Bork's opposition to privacy protections beyond those explicitly outlined in the constitution. [0]
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes". The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bork_tapes#:~:text=On%20Septem...
The VPPA very much applies to online entities. Netflix can collect all the info it wants about you, but is very much limited in what it can share with external parties.
If anything, the law has given cover to shady walled garden business practices that would not have survived otherwise.
Last time I looked up the Bork bill, I read that it was extended to streaming sites during the Obama regime.
You read wrongly. The 2013 amendment merely allowed customers to consent to disclosure electronically via the Internet. Before then, it had to be in writing. It didn't change 18 USC § 2710's explicit application only to a "video tape service provider", and that is how the law still reads today.
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Probably should have went with "era". "Regime" is stuck in my vocabulary because I thought it was funny when I saw it being used that way once.
I think until now, the only real thing preserving these consumer protections (and civil rights, while we're at it) was simply the practical difficulty of collecting and compiling that information. Now it's trivial and effortless to collect this information. The old laws still apply, but now the rubber meets the road in actually having them enforced.
>"thing but on computer"
From a tech layperson, all the tech "innovation" I'm seeing seems to just be old stuff but "online" and therefore not subject to the "old rules".
How about liability for publishers? New York Times publishes something damaging and false? Liable! YouTube publishes something damaging and false but since they did it with a computer they're immune!
you can be very much liable if you publish something damaging and false on YouTube
YouTube publishes it and promotes it, they should be liable.
Wouldn't this cause YouTube to heavily censor and regulate content to avoid lawsuits?
Now that youtube and meta and tiktok choose what is put in front of you they are the publishers. But the law, passed for the early web, is stuck in the past.
Congratulations, you fell victim to the 'platform vs publisher' liability misinformation. It doesn't work like that and has never worked like that, nor should it except for the perfidious pushers of that misinformation.
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
If a librarian put a book out on the front table with a "recommended reading" sign then yeah that seems fair for them to carry some liability if that book were actually libelous. And so it should be for recommended posts on sites like Youtube, Instagram, etc. A chronological or alphabetical index is a factual catalogue of information. A recommendation is you vouching for the material. Totally different.
> Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
>. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices
Why
It worked like that before they changed the law and it can work like that again.
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
Exactly. Why do people keep saying we don't understand it or it's misinformation?
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.
> 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.
Not really. There's a lot of live programming. Ad campaigns may be cancelled and replaced close to the time of airing. Local stations and cable systems preempt national ads and insert their own ads at times.
The way this was resolved was not by tuning ads to the content they interrupt, it was by setting standard audio levels for all programming and tuning the ads to fit that standard.
This feature would take less code than your comment.
In 2010, on the equipment at most TV and cable companies?
Yeah you calculate ReplayGain metadata for the media and let the playback client do normalization to a target level. Unless it's live streaming, pre-calculating gain levels is a non-issue. All the CD ripping/music library software in the 00s already did this because of the loudness war.
In 2010? Certainly.
The US government typically doesn't try to preemptively regulate things (which is getting to be a problem as it now is too sclerotic to respond quickly to developments). Streaming services in 2010 were mostly paid subscriptions with no ads, I don't think the idea was on anyone's mind.
YouTube existed in 2010, and was primarily supported by ADs. Sure at the time it didn't really show what would traditionally be considered television, but it seems like the same logic would apply.
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.
It was still niche. Government is slow to react and is paid off by lobbyists and more recently outright bribes..
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.
Google has also decided it is somehow appropriate to run commercial break length ads now for low production quality/budget user generated content. If I watch a dude filming himself with his phone explain how to best change a bike tire, should I be bombarded with ads similar to the nightly news? Nice value proposition
this is why i believe ad blockers are perfectly moral to use for families
To be fair, Youtube Premium subscription is very affordable and lets you have an ad-free experience. I reward services if they offer ad-free versions for a reasonable price.
And everyone else.
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.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
> 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 does mention compliance with the CALM act, which lays out the precise methodology by which loudness will be measured [1]
> The Calm Act refers to A/85, and A/85:2013 specifies BS.1770 (specifically referencing BS.1770-1) as the source of its loudness measurement techniques (1770-2 did not exist at the time A/85 was finalized). So BS.1770-1 currently serves as the yardstick by which U.S. television programming will be evaluated for CALM Act compliance.
> BS.1770 recommends the Leq(RLB) measurement algorithm, where Leq(W) the frequency weighted sound level measure, xw is the signal at the output of the weighting filter, xRef is the reference level, and T is the length of the audio sequence.
> The drawback of BS.1770 as originally conceived is that it measures average loudness over the entire length of content. This may be fine if the loudness is fairly consistent over time. If not, a quiet section of content may, as illustrated in Figure 5, bias the average level so that it measures as acceptable despite having some sections that are unacceptably loud.
[1] https://www.telestream.net/pdfs/whitepapers/wp-calm-act-comp...
Off topic but I spot another one of those forcibly made acronyms
> Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act of 2010
Sounds like political ones are exempt?
i've noticed this with amazon prime in particular it's got to be at least 25% louder than the actual content i'm watching.
YouTube does this too. We immediately fetch the remote and mute the damn thing. And I'm contemplating finding something that auto mutes for me.
For us, even regular YouTube is substantially louder than any streamer. If we want to watch something on YT than go back to Hulu/Netflix, we always have to adjust the volume. I don’t get it, why, why?
Louder content is more compelling (to a point), so I'd imagine that louder content helps boost watchtime, which is what both Youtube and the video creators are optimizing for. The music industry's "loudness war" seems related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
that's odd to me because a lot of the time I've found that regular YouTube content is on the quieter side to other services.
It's already spelled out in more detail in the FCC guidance which the legislation incorporates by reference. Backing down the private right of action is bullshit though.
What I've been looking for in a player client is automatic loudness adjustment.
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.
My AppleTV 4K’s “reduce loud sounds” and “enhance dialogue” features have made watching TV at night bearable again.
Yes - I mean not "automatic", but user-adjustable. A video player which allows adjusting the dynamic range, just like you can adjust the volume, would be awesome.
Many TVs or speaker systems will have this feature - it's often called something like "night mode."
I remember that ads used to be louder on TV, too.
What stopped that, was that TVs and videotape machines looked for loud content, and used that to trigger ad-skipping.
>What stopped that,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
I didn't know about the act, but I remember when they stopped doing it, and was told that was the reason (I was around in '84).
Might be a "chicken/egg" thing.
is there a programmable tv that i can do something like this ?
i want to mute ads when i am watching espn plus. my current tv is fire tv. i guess i'd have to build a little robot arm that presses mute button on the remote?
if you want to automate pressing buton, there is something called "fingerbot"
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.
SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY AT THE TACOMA DOME!!!
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?
It's still worth it to block ads at the DNS level but ad platforms are wise to the game and now serve from domains that also serve legitimate content.
If the ad is embedded in the video DNS blocking does not typically work.
Sure, but in the world of microservices, maybe it is doable
The sad thing for some of them is that we have developed "ad blindness" if you offer me $1000 to tell you what ad played 2 seconds after an ad, I promise you that I'll fail 99% of the time. My brain just turns them off
Seriously, how is this still a conversation in 2025? It's completely absurd that an entire legislature had to pass a bill (shoutout to California for SB 576, the rest of you take notes) to fix something that is purely an intentional design decision by streaming companies.
The sheer audacity of the industry arguing that it's "technologically too difficult" to match the loudness of an ad to the loudness of the program is an insult to the people who wrote the original CALM Act code ten years ago. They can serve up geo-specific, personalized, real-time ads based on what I ate for dinner last night, but ensuring the audio standard is consistent is where the technology apparently hits a brick wall? Please.
Every time one of those blast-furnace commercials kicks in, it's a perfect encapsulation of how little the streaming platforms respect their paying customers. It’s a deliberate strategy—a final, desperate attempt to shock your brainstem into attention after you've spent an hour in the quiet dynamic range of cinematic dialogue.
I'm not in California, so for now, I'm still relying on my TV's ancient "Night Mode" compressor just to survive the commercial breaks. Hopefully, the rest of the world stops pretending this isn't fixable and applies the same basic standard of decency. Our home theater systems deserve better.
Finally! Bulgarian ads are terrible, too. In fact, the advertisers are beyond stupid, as every time they blast me with their commercial messages and stress me out and hurt my ears, they get banned from my life! Obnoxious marketing does not work in the 21st century!
It's good that regulation is being passed. People here saying it's "sad" that laws need to be made probably miss the point; this is the point of laws.
They exist to ensure things are done right when there's no other incentive to do them right other than "it'd be nice".
That's what Gov is for. You can't let billionaires behave as they want.
I’m glad California is on it. These more they can stick it big tech, the better. Somebody’s got to look out for us.
This is trivial to geofence, so I expect this to be one of those that doesn't benefit the whole country.
I thought Netflix was a paid service?
They bumped rates and have ad-supported tiers now.
As Amazon Prime and Disney+
That doesn't really mean anything, although some people seem to think that it's only free services that can be bad.
I would hope that some would have the good sense to stop paying for bad services, but here we are.
Also Netflix:
BABOOOOOOOOONG!!!!
Any way to block ads entirely on streaming services on a smart TV?
You can replace the YouTube app with SmartTube: https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube
What about Netflix or Prime?
Instead of and app I use Brave browser. It blocks YouTube ads
I heard that most people use piracy. You shouldn't pirate, though - taking food out of a corporation's mouth is morally inexcusable.
.. because corporations are people. /s
Money is an important societal mechanism. It comes with some steep cons however.
I have no real point to this comment.
Legalise the hunting of those working in the advertising industry.
>on a smart TV
Best way to avoid advertising when owning a smart TV is to bash your face into to a wall repeatedly until you can non longer perceive anything.
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.
A company tried to do that, but centralising the hardware so you didn't need to hunt for reception. They were sued out of business quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
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.
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.
Something like Streamio + Realdebrid?
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Commercials should have to be done with no audio. Make Mimes Great Again.
No pass one for accessibility so we can actually hear dialog in the shows.
TVs and streaming devices could, should, and sometimes do fix this as well. I’d pay a little extra for that.
Now do Duolingo. That ping is _so_ loud.
You can disable sound effects (as well as the overdone haptics) in the settings.
even better, he could uninstall it.
Good to know!
Too late in my case, between the loud noises and the infantile UX I've long since deleted the app.
Good, now do YouTube. That crap wakes me up.
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Watching ANYTHING is getting exposed to advertising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement
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!