This new California law could silence your TV

Ear-splitting ads on Netflix and Hulu are no more—at least if you live in California.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Monday that requires streaming services to prevent commercials from cranking the volume when they think the viewer might have popped into the next room for a snack. 

Unlike many pieces of legislation, California SB 576 is short and sweet. Starting next July, any streamer that serves video to California residents “shall not transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany.” The bill cites a federal version of the law designed for traditional broadcast TV, extending the rules to the newer medium. 

“We heard Californians loud and clear, and what’s clear is that they don’t want commercials at a volume any louder than the level at which they were previously enjoying a program,” Newsom said in a press release. “By signing SB 576, California is dialing down this inconvenience across streaming platforms, which had previously not been subject to commercial volume regulations passed by Congress in 2010.”

Bringing old rules into the streaming era

The federal version of California’s legislation, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, became law in 2010 under former President Barack Obama. That law was designed to solve a complaint almost as old as TV commercials themselves, namely that commercials are often many times louder than the content that they’re sandwiched between.

“Since the 1960s, consumers have complained about the jarring effect of television commercials that jump considerably in volume—a trick used by the ad industry to grab viewers’ attention,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a cosponsor of the CALM Act, said when the bill passed. That bill mandated that broadcast stations ensure that volume remains consistent with the level set by the viewer across ads and normal programming.

The CALM Act has been settled law for more than a decade, but enforcement is a different story. In spite of the prohibition on unreasonably loud commercials, complaints to the Federal Communications Commission—the only way the regulatory agency learns of violations—are rising dramatically. The FCC received around 750 complaints in 2022, but by 2024, that number had more than doubled to 1,700. Ultimately, complaints are subjective, but advertisers and broadcasters might be ignoring the law due to the FCC’s scant enforcement efforts.

Because the CALM Act’s requirements pertain to the average volume of an ad, the FCC notes that advertisers may amp up the volume during some parts of a commercial while keeping other parts quieter in order to get around the law. To take volume irregularities into their own hands, the FCC points consumers to in-TV settings for “gain control” and “audio limiters” that internally smooth out volume across different kinds of content. 

The rules are evolving . . . slowly

California’s new law adapts the federal CALM Act to the streaming era, but actually investigating violations and pursuing enforcement is far from figured out. 

In 2023, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and then-Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) introduced an update to the CALM Act that would bring the law into the streaming age. Known as the CALM Modernization Act, the bill set out to accomplish what California just achieved on a state level, regulating the volume of ads on streaming services. Notably, the new version of the act also sought to strengthen the FCC’s investigation and enforcement abilities, but both the House and Senate versions of the bill ultimately languished after being referred to committees.

Enforcement is still an issue, but state laws can have an outsize nationwide impact depending on how they’re written. California’s government oversees the fourth-largest economy in the world, and the entertainment and streaming companies regulated by the new law are largely headquartered in the state—two factors that give the bill’s passage extra oomph.

While an update to the federal legislation seems to have stalled out for now, the FCC could make some changes of its own. Early this year, the FCC signaled its interest in fixing the system when it opened a public comment phase in which the agency would consider other actions it could take “to make sure TV viewers aren’t inundated by exceedingly loud commercials in the future.” The FCC said that initially, it saw viewer complaints drop in the early years after the CALM Act’s passage, but that trend has not continued. 

“Over the past several years, the Commission received thousands of complaints about loud commercials on broadcast, cable, and satellite television,” the agency wrote in a press release. “The high number of complaints took a troubling jump last year, which warrants a second look.”

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