Noise Picks Up on Hushing Loud Ads

Vendors Pitch Solutions for Complying With Pending CALM Regulations

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/14/2011 12:01:00 AM

Turn that darn thing down!

For the pay TV industry, eliminating irritatingly loud commercials is about to become a regulatory requirement.

The Federal Communications Commission is currently drafting rules enforcing the U.S.’s Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which mandates that ads be no louder than the programs they surround.

The agency is required to issue its CALM Act guidelines by Dec. 15, including what fines (if any) will be levied on violators. After that, cable, satellite and telco TV operators will have a year to get their houses in order.

Even before the FCC’s order comes out, vendors of video equipment and monitoring solutions are clamoring for business from operators and cable networks.

FIXING OR RED-FLAGGING

The products designed for CALM compliance are split into two categories: those that normalize audio levels automatically in a video stream, and those that only analyze relative volume levels to send up a red flag over anything that’s too loud.

Jarringly loud commercials have always been an issue for cable operators — but now there’s the threat of FCC penalties, Tektronix vice president of video network monitoring Steve Liu said.

“This is nothing new. Customers don’t want to constantly have to adjust the volume when a commercial comes on,” he said. “The difference now is the CALM Act brings out the urgency of this matter.”

Tektronix this month launched Sentry Assure, a lowercost version of its Sentry monitoring platform specifically designed for CALM compliance. The one-rack-unit-high Sentry Assure device simultaneously listens to hundreds of channels with loudness-detection capabilities and postsplice ad-insertion monitoring, which identifies when local ads are not inserted correctly.

While the FCC’s rules are directed toward multichannel video-programming distributors, programming networks will also need to work proactively to make sure the audio levels in their national feeds comply with the CALM provisions — and respond to viewer complaints.

Cable operators are already in discussions with programmers and broadcasters about ways to resolve audio-leveling problems as close to the point of origin as possible, according to Stan Brovont, Arris’s senior vice president of marketing and business development.

“The solution and compliance to the order will not unilaterally be a cable-operator endeavor,” Brovont said.

The CALM Act directs the FCC to regulate commercial volume in accordance with the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s A/85 recommended practices. But those guidelines, which the ATSC updated in July 2011, are not a technical specifi cation per se. Rather, they are a set of recommendations for how to control program-to-interstitial loudness.

“If you look at A/85, it doesn’t give you just one single thing to follow,” Arris vice president of engineering for digital video systems Santhana Chari said. “It’s more of a giant community effort to solve the problem.”

Meanwhile, cable is continuing its lobbying efforts. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association has argued that the massive scale of operators’ locally inserted ads makes an ongoing monitoring requirement infeasible.

“[O]ne large MSO inserts more than 4 million commercials every day,” the NCTA said in comments to the FCC. “Given the number of channels and volume of commercials, it would be impossible for cable operators to actively monitor all of those channels.”

The American Cable Association is seeking to alleviate the burden of CALM Act compliance on smaller cable operators. Among other things, it wants loudness complaints in national network feeds directed to the largest pay TV provider that carries the network. The ACA also wants “safe harbor” provisions that would exempt operators from penalties if they or their partners have deployed equipment in accordance with ATSC A/85 guidelines.

MIX OF RESPONSES

For now, most pay TV operators, as they await the FCC’s final rules, are taking a wait-and-see stance about their plans with respect to complying with the CALM Act.

Some providers, though, are implementing volume-leveling features.

Dish Network is using SRS Labs’ TruVolume in certain models of its digital video recorder receivers. The TruVolume algorithm monitors 20 different frequency bands, adjusting audio in real time to smooth out bursts of loud volume in the middle range (in which loudness is most noticeable).

“You will see some operators trying to understand what this means for them and what they need to do,” Tektronix’s Liu said. “Other operators are more aggressive and are being more proactive.”