Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/streaming-services-obnoxiously-loud-ads-become-illegal-on-july-1-in-california/

by speckx • 25 days ago

291 94 25 days ago

arstechnica.com

buffer_overlord• 25 days ago

I just use Spotify premium how do you get feee music with ads??

microgpt• 25 days ago

Idk either. For free music without ads, there's piracy

vitally3643• 25 days ago

UBlock in Firefox removes Spotify ads for free.

el_io• 25 days ago

My 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.

iamshs• 25 days ago

Went 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• 25 days ago

This 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• 25 days ago

Well, 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)

b1122• 25 days ago

My 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• 25 days ago

How did you stop this behavior?

globular-toast• 25 days ago

My 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?

felix-the-cat• 25 days ago

I had a neighbor when I was a kid who had a TV in every room in their house, including the damned kitchen. And they were always on.

Calvin02• 25 days ago

I 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• 25 days ago

I 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.

pkulak2• 25 days ago

I 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.

dinfinity2• 25 days ago

They have a "stable volume" toggle, actually. I don't see ads, so I don't know whether it works for those.

tabbytown• 25 days ago

Supposedly 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

topranks6• 25 days ago

Because content creators have a right to produce audio how they want.

If it’s a video of someone speaking in a quiet voice it shouldn’t have to have an average volume level of a new Metallica video. Forcing people to use heavy dynamic range compression to get it there would not be good.

chaostheory• 25 days ago

YouTube is a completely different experience once you pay to turn off the automated ads

distances• 25 days ago

Or use an ad blocker.

tzs2• 25 days ago

The ads sometimes being loud on YouTube usually doesn't bother me (except recently when it was an extra loud woman shouting something like "My husband fucked me all night last night" and proceeded to extol the virtues of the product that I am supposed to believe allowed for that bedroom performance--that was so annoying and it was so different from the ads they normally show me it earned YouTube a week with the ad blocker on [1]).

What I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.

With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?

[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.

For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.

grayhatter• 25 days ago

Your willingness to try to play fair to advertisers (a group with an earned reputation of going out of their way to avoid anything resembling good faith) is admirable, but won't show up in metrics.

Protect your attention (and frustration levels) by running adblock full time. If you want to influence their behavior so everyone stops running annoying ads. You have to give the ad sellers a reason to re-evaluate what ads they're willing to show. The only way you can do that is increasing the number of users who don't view ads. Starting with in off, makes you a user who views ads, not the kind making a point.

It's unlikely that you're meaningfully able to influence the system. You're much more likely to respond and adapt to the system, so it's more likely that youtube has trained you to watch ads.

sph• 23 days ago

Why would you willingly turn off ad blocking? Get Youtube Premium if you want channels to get some revenue out of you, but why would choose to get blasted by ads, with these complicated rules. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

zapzupnz• 25 days ago

Voilà, I think you may have fallen for their trap. That's why they've done nothing about this to date even though volume normalisation is a solved problem.

petcat• 25 days ago

This was a ridiculous loophole that needed to be closed. FCC has already made this practice illegal over broadcast TV.

kstrauser5• 25 days 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• 25 days 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.

kstrauser5• 25 days ago

All that’s true, but those factors affect all the audio similarly. The article specifically talks about server-side ad insertion, so it’s not like the case where it somehow uses the device’s .mov codec to play the content and an MP3 codec to play the ad. All ffmpeg (most likely) knows is that it’s decoding one long stream, and doesn’t switch audio pipelines mid-stream when it thinks it might be playing an ad at that moment.

Regarding the perceptual volume differences: while true, that’s also a solvable problem. Output volumes can be calculated using standard curves. In any case, TV broadcasters have had to figure all this out years ago.

b1122• 25 days ago

I guess in the interim, while they try to work it out, they'll just have to make sure it's quieter.

Start at 1/4 the volume they use now.

After all, they don't need to approach compliance tuning and debugging from the loud side. They can start at a whisper and work up.

(I hope they get fined into bankruptcy, if they try to claim they're "working on it", but do so from the loud side.)

davemp• 25 days ago

It definitely isn’t simple, but it’s a pretty well trod path. If the FCC or state equivalent doesn’t have folks who can write the spec that’s a huge problem. I would be surprised if an existing spec doesn’t already exist that just needs to be applied to this scenario.

The streamers should be responsible for the signal. If the device front end has crazy frequency response or the backend does weird DSP tricks, that’s on the device manufacturers.

rdedev• 25 days ago

The group includes Netflix, the most technically capable streaming company. It's sad that companies will only go down kicking and screaming even for the mildest of regulations

kstrauser5• 25 days ago

Yeah. If I had to do this, there’s the likelihood I’d screw it up. I am not Netflix, who quite good at the whole streaming video thing. I find it very hard to believe there are technical challenges in this law that Netflix couldn’t possibly solve.

pengaru• 25 days ago

It's arguably a good strategy to make mountains out of mole hills from their perspective. It drains the regulators' finite resources on relatively trivial matters, and I think it goes without saying there are less trivial and more egregious exploits continuing, more unchecked now as a result.

TL;DR distract the enemy with resource sinks

avereveard• 25 days ago

I hate loud ads as well as anyone else and I welcome this resolution but I would not treat the challenges regulation poses as simplisticly as this. There is a lot of research in increasing loudness without increasing decibels, especially for concerts, but it migrated to ads when tv started adding automatic volume controls to normalize across services.

pkulak2• 25 days ago

I think the point is that when you don’t control the ad, it’s a bit tough to normalize its audio. And controlling the ad means bringing ad serving in house, which while possible, is a huge engineering ask.

I guess the solution is to switch to a proper ad insertion company that normalizes to -24 like you’re supposed to, but that’s not cake either. Especially if contracts are signed.

Ar-Curunir• 25 days ago

Well maybe then they should have done quality control. We’ve gotta stop making excuses for these companies that are making money hand over fist.

dinfinity2• 25 days ago

I assume that they also have mechanisms to check that the content itself is legal to broadcast. Checking the loudness and rejecting based on them in that process should be trivial.

mitthrowaway2• 25 days ago

If you're streaming the audio waveform, you can calculate the peak volume and adjust the gain.

tzs2• 25 days 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? 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?

Consider a streaming movie with surround sound with an inserted ad that is in stereo. I'm playing it on a 5.1 home theater system and you are playing it on a stereo phone. Your system is mixing the surround sound down to stereo.

When your device does that it applies attenuation to the program so that if several channels in the 5.1 stream have something loud all at the same time it won't be too loud in the down mix for stereo and clip. When the commercial cuts in your device recognizes it is ordinary stereo and it doesn't need to down mix. It goes straight through without the attenuation that down mixer applies to the program.

Whatever level the commercial is really at relative to the program, it is going to sound loader than that on your system because of that attenuation difference.

On my device it is not attenuating the 5.1 program since it has all the necessary channels. However, if the commercial is at the same level as the program it will actually sound louder on mine. That's because the same total level of sound split among 5 speakers perceptually seems less loud than the same total level coming from stereo speakers.

The streamer can do loudness normalization between the program and the commercial. It can calculate what the perceived human loudness will be at any time in the adjust the levels so that on my device the perceived level of the 5.1 program when it gets to the commercial will match the perceived level of the commercial on stereo.

But for devices that are down mixing to stereo there is still going to be the attenuation the down mixers uses, and that differs from device to device. That limits what can be done server side to get the program and commercial to match.

Some multichannel formats do include metadata for the device telling it how much to attenuate when down mixing to stereo. If all the device supported that it should be possible for the server to fully take care of loudness matching. Otherwise you probably need device side normalization.

Another approach would be to up mix the stereo commercial server side to whatever surround sound format the program is using. Then they could do server side loudness normalization between the program and the commercial without it being messed up by the difference in how stereo devices down mix.

I'm not sure why that is generally not done. LLMs are suggesting several reasons but I have no idea if they are reasonable. I'll leave exploring that to someone else.

hliyan• 25 days ago

Considering 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• 25 days ago

This 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.

jonmoore• 25 days ago

Not “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• 25 days ago

Even 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• 25 days ago

Instagram 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• 25 days ago

I experience this on Facebook on iOS. Glad I’m not the only one. Super irritating.

itopaloglu83• 25 days ago

It 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.

wtallis2• 25 days ago

It 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.

dlcarrier• 25 days ago

I blame Apple for that. They've majorly bungled HDR. The worst part is that everyone follows them, so we have a bunch of hardware vendors trying to tie HDR to numbers they can brag about (brightness) while video content producers just want to make dark scenes without banding.

cmovq• 25 days ago

Is there a technical reason why apple doesn’t allow HDR to be selectively turned off? I’m surprised this is still not at least an accessibility option.

idolofdust• 25 days ago

Go to the accessibility disply settings, turn on white point, then set it to the lowest percentage you can. HDR is no more.

budoso• 25 days ago

FYI You can get stop this by enabling low power mode.

thenoblesunfish• 25 days ago

What's the technical definition of loudness that applies here? Is it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS ?

asdff• 25 days ago

Waiting for California to ban obnoxiously bright electronic billboards next. The meatspace could use some love too.

kube-system3• 25 days ago

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont got this right by simply banning all billboards.

Vinnl• 25 days ago

I 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.

plagiarist• 25 days ago

Those need to be banned, the billboard trucks (and boats) need to be banned, and the shockingly bright headlamps need to be banned.

kube-system3• 25 days 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.

dylan6042• 25 days 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.

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• 25 days ago

louder ads are coming from an ad provider

Ad is coming from provider. Volume is not.

bayarearefugee• 25 days 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• 25 days ago

You can do volume normalization, it's a thing. Lets not pretend this is some black magic.

amiga3862• 25 days ago

Option 3: Streaming platforms add to their contracts with ad delivery networks that they must faithfully represent a ReplayGain value in the metadata of every advert before delivery. The streaming platform can then have its clients adjust the volume they play adverts at.

Bonus: the clients can sample the advert audio and send back the computed ReplayGain, compared to the claimed ReplayGain. Add a penalty clause in the contract for every single advert delivered louder than claimed.

dpark• 25 days ago

loudness doesn't have a standard

It literally does. Audio players were implementing ReplayGain support 25 years ago.

ad platforms would have to have multiple audio streams limited to the different loudness settings

This is trivial to solve. You have a standardized volume and a scale factor for each service. Or you use ReplayGain or similar for the same.

it's not a hard problem in the least

No, it’s really not.

gloryjulio• 25 days ago

We can have a volume normalization ceiling function in the final pass of video data compression stream for the ads injection section. The volume normalization variable can be chosen by the stream er so that the ads' volume would be clamped below the maximum of the streamed content volume.

Conceptually I don't see how hard it is for the stream provider to implement this. Whether they want to implement is another story.

hurfdurf• 25 days ago

loudness doesn't have a standard

If you can't create, copy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBU_R_128

sublinear• 25 days ago

The ads are also timed poorly. This has not been fixed for decades. No amount of audio normalization can fix a quieter moment being interrupted.

This is just as much the fault of streaming platform exclusive content having no time to breathe. Nobody sane really wants to sit through an episode of anything that lasts longer than 20 to 30 minutes. The binge watching era died when the ads became forced upon all tiers, but there is a compromise that is proven to work. Just go back to the old episodic format of broadcast/cable already.

anjel• 25 days ago

Also a thing with podcast adverts.

lacoolj• 25 days ago

I 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 :)

topranks6• 25 days ago

Really 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• 25 days ago

In 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.

Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

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