• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

I am SHOUTING AT YOU.

JoeZhang

Vice Admiral
Admiral
Aptly named the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM), the bill, passed Thursday by the Senate, puts a limit on the volume of television commercials, banning advertisers from raising the volume louder than regular programming. The FCC will be in charge of regulating the new legislation. CALM will now head back to the House, which passed an earlier version of the bill in December, before it will land on President Obama's desk. After decades of pointless struggle, finally TV lovers won't jump out of their seats while watching re-runs of To Catch A Predator at two in the morning.


http://www.fastcompany.com/1692314/...at-you-congress-finally-turns-down-the-volume
 
Oh, thank god. It's about time. I've always been annoyed at that. Now maybe the next step could be TV shows or specific networks from being so loud. G4, I'm looking at you.

And let's be thankful that it wasn't Billy Mays selling Head On. ;)
 
We could do with something like this in the UK - having said that, most of watching is now done on a time-shifted basis and so I miss the ads anyway.
 
Cool. Now if only they'd get rid of them all together or regulate how many are played durring a show or movie and how often, I'd be even happier.
 
Excellent! One of our new stations here answers viewer mail once a week and every so often they'll read a complaint about the commercials being so loud. They seem to go out of their way to say that the commercials are always the same volume as the broadcast. Fucking liars!
 
Of course, the commercials cannot be louder than the loudest portion of the program--so all they need to do is have one very short portion of the program loud, and then the commercial can match that.

Well, I'm assuming this.
 
Last edited:
It's always been my understanding this is more a function of how the programing is compressed from the network verses how the commercials are compressed/broadcast from the local affiliate. I also fail to see how this "problem" (easily corrected by someone with a "Mute" or "Volume Down" button on their remotes or a FF button while on Time-Shift) warrants the attention of Congress given, you know, the millions of unemployed people and all of the other problems this country is facing.

Should we clean up global messes, help people get jobs or see that funds are being handled properly? Nope. Making sure people don't have turn their TVs down that's something we need to take care of!

:rolleyes:
 
Well, it's definitely a problem of compression, and there may even be TVs with a feature of automatically adjusting volume during commercials, but the point is, it's a growing problem that people are annoyed with. I notice that children networks are particularly bad at this, the decibels being very high. It is a legitimate concern. Maybe not so much of programming, but of a lack of standards in place allowing this to happen.
 
Have to agree with Trekker4747. I should think there are more important matters that should be brought to the government's attention.

Personally, I find it far more annoying how advertising has started to disrupt the audience's vieiwng pleasure in the form of banners and pop-ups during the shows. Watching commercial television is looking more and more like watching a continuous advertisement.

That's why I am avoiding watching commerical tv more and more these days. I only watch public tv (Dutch or the BBC) or cable channels (which have far less commericial breaks).
 
The problem is the ads blast your ears before you can press the mute button. And I'd rather Congress waste their time on this then all the really stupid and destructive shit they do.
 
Well, it's definitely a problem of compression, and there may even be TVs with a feature of automatically adjusting volume during commercials, but the point is, it's a growing problem that people are annoyed with. I notice that children networks are particularly bad at this, the decibels being very high. It is a legitimate concern. Maybe not so much of programming, but of a lack of standards in place allowing this to happen.

I don't see how a moment's annoyance is of any real concern, let alone legitimate, when there's a whole lot of other shit going on in this country that needs attention. Seriously?! This is the big problem we have? People being momentarily bugged by a loud noise coming from their TV?

Seriously?!

Give me a break. This was hardly an issue that needed to be taken care of at any government level and people just need to get over themselves and turn their TV down, hit mute, or just deal with the "louder" commercials. (Which, again, is more a function of the compression than it is actual volume. It sounds louder but no volume level on either the TV or at the station is being increased.)

Deal with it, the loud commercials bug me too but I just turn the TV down or hit mute. We can't go to government to solve non-issue "problems" like this. How many millions of tax-payer dollars were spent writing up, presenting, discussing and arguing this bill? How much time wasted? Wouldn't that all have been better spent on pretty much any other problem going on right now?

It annoys me that AM radio sucks so much and is unlisten-to-able when in undergound garages or going through an underpass. I think we need to work to do away with AM radio and give all the AM stations FM frequencies!

I mean, fuck unemployment, health care, the oil spill, the energy crisis, developing new energy resources, taking care of the people in Haiti that we promised money to that is being held up by some douchebag worried how .05% of the money is being spent, screw the neutered Health Care bill and how little it's going to do to help people, Americans who've been protesting for three months to prevent other Americans from expressing their First Amendment Rights and fuck those soldiers over-seas! My TV is too loud sometimes!
 
Well, it's definitely a problem of compression, and there may even be TVs with a feature of automatically adjusting volume during commercials, but the point is, it's a growing problem that people are annoyed with. I notice that children networks are particularly bad at this, the decibels being very high. It is a legitimate concern. Maybe not so much of programming, but of a lack of standards in place allowing this to happen.

I don't see how a moment's annoyance is of any real concern, let alone legitimate, when there's a whole lot of other shit going on in this country that needs attention. Seriously?! This is the big problem we have? People being momentarily bugged by a loud noise coming from their TV?

Seriously?!

....

I mean, fuck unemployment, health care, the oil spill, the energy crisis, developing new energy resources, taking care of the people in Haiti that we promised money to that is being held up by some douchebag worried how .05% of the money is being spent, screw the neutered Health Care bill and how little it's going to do to help people, Americans who've been protesting for three months to prevent other Americans from expressing their First Amendment Rights and fuck those soldiers over-seas! My TV is too loud sometimes!
You and I both know that little positive progress will come out of Congress doing anything because the politicians are too fucking obsessed with their fucking ideals and appealing to their bases to do anything pragmatically. Better to have them deal with inconsequential bullshit than fuck things over some more.
 
Well, it's definitely a problem of compression, and there may even be TVs with a feature of automatically adjusting volume during commercials, but the point is, it's a growing problem that people are annoyed with. I notice that children networks are particularly bad at this, the decibels being very high. It is a legitimate concern. Maybe not so much of programming, but of a lack of standards in place allowing this to happen.

I don't see how a moment's annoyance is of any real concern, let alone legitimate, when there's a whole lot of other shit going on in this country that needs attention. Seriously?! This is the big problem we have? People being momentarily bugged by a loud noise coming from their TV?

Seriously?!

Give me a break. This was hardly an issue that needed to be taken care of at any government level and people just need to get over themselves and turn their TV down, hit mute, or just deal with the "louder" commercials. (Which, again, is more a function of the compression than it is actual volume. It sounds louder but no volume level on either the TV or at the station is being increased.)

Deal with it, the loud commercials bug me too but I just turn the TV down or hit mute. We can't go to government to solve non-issue "problems" like this. How many millions of tax-payer dollars were spent writing up, presenting, discussing and arguing this bill? How much time wasted? Wouldn't that all have been better spent on pretty much any other problem going on right now?

It annoys me that AM radio sucks so much and is unlisten-to-able when in undergound garages or going through an underpass. I think we need to work to do away with AM radio and give all the AM stations FM frequencies!

I mean, fuck unemployment, health care, the oil spill, the energy crisis, developing new energy resources, taking care of the people in Haiti that we promised money to that is being held up by some douchebag worried how .05% of the money is being spent, screw the neutered Health Care bill and how little it's going to do to help people, Americans who've been protesting for three months to prevent other Americans from expressing their First Amendment Rights and fuck those soldiers over-seas! My TV is too loud sometimes!


Hey whoa, settle down. I never actively disagreed with you. I wish all these things could be fixed as the next guy. I have friends and a cousin serving overseas, and a friend who's a Veteran in Alaska who feels like he's been mistreated as a Veteran. There are a lot of problems that the government could fix, but they're not all so easy to fix. These things take time. Meanwhile, other departments need to do their jobs too. And I doubt an effort like this will stop the efforts in trying to fix some of the major problems.
 
And this isn't a problem that should even be on their RADAR.

I mean we're really going to legislate and industry and enforce codes and restrictions so that people don't have to bothered to turn their TVs down? Really?!
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top