Proposed Law Aimed at Loud TV Ads

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - Calif. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park) is one of many people who are tired of commercials being blasted out of their televisions. Eshoo wanted to do something to stop this advertising ploy so she introduced the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act , aimed at lowering the volume on TV commercials.

Critics of the bill say Congress has better things to worry about, but Eshoo says a lot of people are passionate about this issue.

"It's a great source of irritation to anyone who's watching TV," Eshoo told NPR . "It certainly was to me; it is to my family; it is to my friends; it is to my constituents. This is one of the top complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. It really strikes a chord."

There is a reason why TV commercials seem louder than the programs. Commercials are allowed to air at the peak level for all programming. Scenes such as explosions and car crashes are usually filmed at the peak level. When you're watching a program that is having a quiet moment right before the commercials begin, then the ads are going to feel like they're blasting out of your set.

Eshoo's bill proposes to make the peak volume of commercials match the peak volume of the segment airing just before it. The bill was recently passed by the House, and an identical bill has been sent to the Senate.

She is confident the Senate will pass the bill as well, but some say it will take more than government intervention for the issue to be resolved.

"I just don't have a lot of confidence that the FCC is going to make this magically happen," said Berin Szoka of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a market-based think tank in Washington, D.C. "To assume that only government is able to make this happen sets a very dangerous precedent for inviting government micromanagement -- not only of television but of all media and the Internet in particular."

In September the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), a technical organization that sets standards for digital TV broadcasters, suggested that new audio recommendations should be able to measure the loudness of television content based on current scientific understandings of how human hearing works.

"It's a problem that's been around for awhile not only in analog TV but also in FM radio," Mark Richer, president of ATSC, told LiveScience . "[The new recommendation] achieves results similar to a viewer using a remote control to set a comfortable volume between disparate TV programs, commercials, and channel changing transitions."

In 2007, Dolby unveiled a technology called Dolby Volume , designed to level volume across channels and programs, but it is only available in one TV and three receivers. SRS Labs is finalizing a consumer gadget that will also try to address the volume issue. The gadget would be added to consumers' A/V setup in order to level out the highs and lows.

SRS is hoping to partner with manufacturers to bundle the technology into products.