5 ms·
Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California
- buffer_overlord 4mo agoI just use Spotify premium how do you get feee music with ads??
- microgpt 4mo agoIdk either. For free music without ads, there's piracy
- AegeanGreen 4mo ago[dead]
- vitally3643 4mo agoUBlock in Firefox removes Spotify ads for free.
- el_io 4mo agoMy 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.
- seobot_dk1289 4mo ago[flagged]
- iamshs 4mo agoWent 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.
- tremon 4mo agoThis sounds like automatic gain correction, which is an appropriate solution to this problem. The only thing that IG could be doing better is to calculate the gain on the upcoming 1s instead of the previous. And actually, I would say that the correction should be punitive: if the stream volume crosses a certain threshold, a flat -6dB should be applied on top of the calculated correction.
- phendrenad2 4mo agoWell, 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)
- b112 4mo agoMy 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?!
- copperx 4mo agoHow did you stop this behavior?
- urbnspacecowboy 4mo agoNot OP but I suspect the answer is "I didn't stop it, eventually I moved out on my own."
- globular-toast 4mo agoMy 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?
- 4mo ago
- Calvin02 4mo agoI 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.
- nephihaha 4mo agoI 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.
- pkulak 4mo agoI 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.
- dinfinity 4mo agoThey have a "stable volume" toggle, actually. I don't see ads, so I don't know whether it works for those.
- Filligree 4mo agoThey 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.
- tabbytown 4mo agoSupposedly they'll turn it down if it's mastered louder than -14 LUFS. They won't turn it up if it's quieter. I couldn't find a Youtube source for this but it's mentioned extensively online: https://audio.rswaver.com/blog/youtube-loudness-standards https://audio.rswaver.com/blog/youtube-loudness-standards
- topranks 4mo ago
- AegeanGreen 4mo ago[dead]
- petcat 4mo agoThis was a ridiculous loophole that needed to be closed. FCC has already made this practice illegal over broadcast TV.
- kstrauser 4mo ago> 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.
- chimeracoder 4mo ago> 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.
- hliyan 4mo agoConsidering 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.
- nsagent 4mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jonmoore 4mo agoNot “instead of” but “in addition to”. Government regulation is not perfect but is the first-best solution to imposing such injunctions, and prima facie is much more effective than social norms or industry self-regulation. That’s a major part of why the industry bodies are objecting to it.
- Cider9986 4mo agoEven 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.
- zimpenfish 4mo agoInstagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.
- tylerrobinson 4mo agoI experience this on Facebook on iOS. Glad I’m not the only one. Super irritating.
- itopaloglu83 4mo agoIt looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.
- wtallis 4mo agoIt has always struck me as strange and user-hostile that most of the computing and entertainment world has decided to couple together the transition from SDR to HDR with a conceptually unrelated switch from relative to absolute brightness scales, and to not really make any effort to explain to users what's going on with that.
- LoganDark 4mo agoI think the main issue is devices treating SDR as inherently dim, and then upgrading HDR to extremely bright. I want my SDR white as bright as the brightest HDR white -- or at the very least configurable to that. Then HDR wouldn't be such a flashbang. And I wouldn't be leaving most of my display's capability on the table in daily use -- it's super annoying that my display is capable of more than doubling its brightness, but just doesn't, whenever I don't happen to be watching an HDR movie. To me, brighter is better as long as it preserves color accuracy. There are third-party apps to increase the display's brightness, but it causes weird issues on my MacBook's MiniLED display by making the cursor a noticeable drop in backlight intensity. Hopefully, the OLED MacBooks fix this, one of these years -- I always hated how obvious MiniLED's backlight zones are
- thenoblesunfish 4mo agoWhat's the technical definition of loudness that applies here? Is it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS ?
- asdff 4mo agoWaiting for California to ban obnoxiously bright electronic billboards next. The meatspace could use some love too.
- kube-system 4mo agoAlaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont got this right by simply banning all billboards.
- Vinnl 4mo agoI never understood why we're OK with placing billboards, which by definition try their best to get you to look at them, next to the road, which we're supposed to look at.
- knollimar 4mo agoThey should be at stoplights not on highways
- kube-system 4mo agoIntersections are the most dangerous parts of highways, it is even more critical to be paying attention there.
- knollimar 4mo agoDigital sign that only shows the ad on red light then.
- plagiarist 4mo agoThose need to be banned, the billboard trucks (and boats) need to be banned, and the shockingly bright headlamps need to be banned.
- kube-system 4mo ago> [...] opposed the bill. 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,” Well, stop "trying" and fix it already. It's your own damn system.
- dylan604 4mo agobut it's not. it's right there in what you quoted. the louder ads are coming from an ad provider. ad providers are the problem. loudness doesn't have a standard. different streamers want different loudness settings. ad platforms would have to have multiple audio streams limited to the different loudness settings. it's not a hard problem in the least, but one of adding to the complexity of content management. or the streaming platforms could take over ad delivery and take it on as part of their internal content management.
- wetpaws 4mo ago>louder ads are coming from an ad provider Ad is coming from provider. Volume is not.
- bayarearefugee 4mo ago> but it's not. it's right there in what you quoted. the louder ads are coming from an ad provider. ad providers are the problem. Then the streaming services are failing to punish their ad providers, so they still have culpability.
- stevemk14ebr 4mo agoYou can do volume normalization, it's a thing. Lets not pretend this is some black magic.
- beepbooptheory 4mo agoProbably makes more sense here to use a compressor at the end of the chain right? It would be kind of surprising to me if there isnt one already..
- anjel 4mo agoAlso a thing with podcast adverts.
- lacoolj 4mo agoI wonder if this means Apple TV will make their show volumes louder finally (aka, standard levels of other apps so I don't need to put my speaker at 39/40 to hear what should be 25/40) Though, I don't even know if Apple TV has an ad-supported plan. This is mainly wishful thinking here :)
- topranks 4mo agoReally hope they aren’t forced to do that. Apple TV one of the few streamers with decent quality audio. We don’t need a “loudness war” for TV and movie content.
- linzhangrun 4mo agoIn China, problems like this are usually solved through departmental internal documents, or just through officials directly, privately and orally command. Passing legislation for this kind of thing is almost impossible. This is the so-called "rule by man". It is quite an interesting thing to see a country across the ocean solving this kind of problem through law.