Crying Baby Stirs Effort To Regulate Volume on Streaming Commercials

No one looks forward to commercial breaks while they are watching their favorite show, and certainly no one wants them blasting louder than the show itself.A 2010 federal law — known as the CALM Act — limits advertisement volumes on broadcast and cable TV, but when the law was passed it didn’t consider then-nascent streaming services. At the time, Netflix had only about 18 million subscribers. It now has more than 300 million and several other streaming services have millions of other customers.Now, with 83 percent of households using at least one streaming service, a California lawmaker is trying to fix the loophole that exempts streaming services from the CALM Act.State Senator Tom Umberg — a Santa Ana Democrat — is behind SB 576, which would prohibit a video streaming service from transmitting the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content that they appear alongside.Mr. Umberg says he came up with the proposal because of a story shared by his legislative director, Zach Keller. Mr. Keller has an 8-month-old named Samantha Rose. She had finally settled down to sleep, only to be shocked awake by an extremely loud ad on a streaming platform.“Anyone who’s had a baby, you know the golden rule is you have to keep the baby asleep and anything that wakes that baby up should be closely scrutinized,” Mr. Umberg says.He calls the audio boost jarring and fixable. “If they can target ads to me based on my age and favorite cereal, I have the utmost faith they could fix this problem,” Mr. Umberg says.But the streaming industry says it’s not so simple. The vice president of state government affairs at the Motion Picture Association, Melissa Patack, says while the bill is “well intended,” it is not practical to do for streaming because ads come from several different sources.“The environment for advertising that accompanies programming on broadcast and cable linear networks is markedly different from that in the streaming environment,” Ms. Patack says.“The streaming platform may not be able to control the loudness of a particular ad,” she adds.Mr. Umberg doesn’t buy that argument. He says, “This isn’t a question of whether streaming services can do this. It’s a question of whether they want to.”The measure has already unanimously sailed through the state senate and now is up for a final vote in the state assembly after the chamber’s privacy and consumer protection committee signed off on it.While it would be a state law, the practicality of carrying it out would likely fix the issue for consumers nationwide.The New York Sun has contacted Governor Newsom’s office to find out his position on the bill if it passes the assembly and is still awaiting a reply. If the bill is signed into law, it would go into effect on July 1, 2026.

Crying Baby Stirs Effort To Regulate Volume on Streaming Commercials

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