Loud TV Commercials—The Storm Before the CALM

I was watching the Knicks/Heat game in our hotel room last night, and I could barely hear the announcers over the room air-conditioning unit fan. Why hotel units have to be as loud as the wind tunnel at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I’ll never know. Anyway, I started raising the volume until I could hear the sportscasters at a normal conversation level. Then the commercial came on and I was nearly blasted out of my seat. And it was just some guy talking about dish TV, although he sounded like he was shouting loud enough to be heard by an outdoor concert audience.

I started wondering about the law that Congress had allegedly passed that required commercials to be broadcast at the same sound levels as regular programming. I thought it was supposed to go into effect at the beginning of the year. So I decided to do a little research on the Internet.

It seems that after years of complaints about loud commercials, Congress decided to act with its usual alacrity and passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM, in early December of 2010. Leave it to Congress to come up with clever names rather than clever solutions. Many of the news programs incorrectly reported that we could expect loud commercials to disappear by January of 2012. But according to some interpretations of the Mayan calendar, and the foresight of Congress, we may experience the end times before we experience the end of loud commercials.

Although it may take Congress years to address a problem, once addressed, the problem must not be resolved too quickly. So we almost always have phased in solutions that allow the perpetrators more time to come up with ways to circumvent the new rules. In the case of CALM, the FCC was given a year to adopt new rules and broadcasters would be given another year to comply with those rules.

Needless to say, the FCC took the full year because no government agency must ever complete a task in less than the allotted time. This would set a bad precedent and cause irreparable harm to the entire system. You might think the rule-making process would be relatively simple given that the single purpose of the legislation was to make sure that commercials were broadcast at the same volume as the regular programming. But that would assume the existence of the sort of logic that has never been evident in government.

Most of us think this would simply be a matter of controlling decibel levels. But it’s never that simple with government regulations. Regulations must be complicated and compliance measures must be vague. So it is with CALM. Commercially reasonable efforts constitute compliance, which seems to leave the door wide open to whatever the broadcasters argue is reasonable. I suppose a broadcaster could merely flash a warning prior to commercials recommending viewers put cotton in their ears or leave the room, and the FCC might consider that compliant. If compliance is too difficult, broadcasters may be granted annual, renewable waivers for financial hardship or a general waiver on some technicality.

Try asking your cable company for a waiver of any of the fees you don’t understand on your cable bill. I’m sure they’d be all too willing to grant one. More likely, we will all see a new fee on our cable bills for the costs of some minimal effort to comply with the requirements of CALM because the cable company never absorbs the cost of any regulation. So whether or not you actually experience a sound-level reduction in commercials, you will most likely be paying for the cost of implementing whatever strategy the broadcasters use to circumvent it. I expect that the only real control we’ll continue to have over the volume of commercials is the mute button. Either that, or we’ll all go deaf from listening to loud commercials and it will no longer be a problem.

I suppose that one of the most irritating aspects of the entire situation is that I foolishly believed the hype in the days that preceded pay television, or cable. Subscriber paid programming was supposed to offer us quality content without commercials. Pay TV was supposed to be like public television only better, with more choices and more variety. Pay television now rivals commercial television in the amount of commercial and infomercial programming. Even public television now spends so much time airing pledge drives that it may as well switch to commercial programming.

I expect we’ll seem minimal change in commercial volume levels amidst excuses from broadcasters about the technical difficulties, lack of controls, and costs involved. The FCC will have yet another set of ambiguous rules that it doesn’t enforce. And more people will start subscribing to Internet media content delivery services until commercials overwhelm those services too. Our last refuge from loud, annoying commercials may be books, although I suspect someone is already working on a way to insert advertising into eBooks and eReaders.