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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
by tzs 1y ago
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.
- lostmsu 1y agoThis feature would take less code than your comment.
- tzs 1y agoIn 2010, on the equipment at most TV and cable companies?
- lostmsu 1y agoIn 2010? Certainly.
- ndriscoll 1y agoYeah 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.
- toast0 1y ago> 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.