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

arstechnica.com

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

#31

Post by dinfinity »

pkulak wrote: post #22
kstrauser wrote: post #12

> 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…

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by nsagent »

hliyan wrote: post #28

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 /…

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.

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

#33

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

pkulak wrote: post #22
kstrauser wrote: post #12

> 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…

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.

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

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

#34

Post by dualvariable »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #29
pkulak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

They might have to hire some people and create some jobs...

Oh, the humanity...

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

#35

Post by radley »

kstrauser wrote: post #15
chimeracoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

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…

> those factors affect all the audio similarly... Output volumes can be calculated using standard curves... TV broadcasters have had to figure all this out years ago.

Sorry, but all of that is obtuse. The fact that some digital audio can be perceived as much louder than others –– yet it's all limited to the same digital range –– proves they aren't similar at all.

There is no such thing as a standard curve for compression. Source levels vary almost infinitely. Accurately separating and reducing sound after the fact, without turning the whole thing to mud, is considered to be an impossible technical challenge.

Next, TV broadcasters worked on a predetermined schedule with predetermined advertising. This gave them time to inspect and approve ads in advance.

Streaming ads are generally served just in time from third-party services to the streaming host. FFMPEG gets the output from the stream host, but the host has to combine content together from multiple sources (entertainment + multiple ad servers) into that single stream. Currently, sound-level is completely at the whim of each ad server, as well as each ad producer. Meanwhile, the final output is at the whim of the streaming host: 24-hour-news streaming sites probably have different audio standards than Apple TV+.

Ultimately, AI could potentially be used to solve it, since it can generate / make-up new sounds as part of reverse-compression. But it would still have to be done in advance by the third-party ad servers.

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

#36

Post by Filligree »

dinfinity wrote: post #27
pkulak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

They do, but as usual with those, it wrecks all the decently mixed videos by making everything the same volume.

Though as those are rare as hen’s teeth, perhaps you might as well.

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

#37

Post by radley »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #33
pkulak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Most streaming audio already share the same peak volume. The problem is compression. You can compress the hell out of audio, make it sound extremely loud, and it will still have the same peak volume as uncompressed audio.

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

#38

Post by kstrauser »

radley wrote: post #35
kstrauser wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> those factors affect all the audio similarly... Output volumes can be calculated using standard curves... TV broadcasters have had to figure all this out years ago. Sorry, but all of that is obtuse. The fact that some digital audio can be perceived as much louder than others –– yet it's all limited to the same digital range –– proves they aren't similar at all. There is no such thing as a standard curve for compres…

None of this is true. There are standard curves for human hearing frequency response and you can use these to compare sound A’s volume to sound B. And since sound compression is in DCT space, you can calculate those numbers very quickly with something similar to sum(vol(f) * curve(f) for f in encoded_frequencies).

I read the article. It specifically talks about server-side ad embedding, i.e. where the service is inserting ad content into the streams, and therefore, by definition, has access to the ad content. They can do the calculations on their end during the embedding process and normalize volumes there before transmitting the result. To make things even easier, they don’t have to calculate the ad volume each time one’s streamed, just once per ad they’re going to serve.

And finally, all of this is a solved problem for TV broadcasters. They face the same problems: advertisers send them content to air, then the broadcasters are legally required to normalize the ad vs content volume, and they do. If this is an insurmountable problem that the streaming services face, they can drive over to their nearest TV station and ask them how they manage to pull off this technological feat.

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

#39

Post by pengaru »

rdedev wrote: post #14
kstrauser wrote: post #12

> 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…

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

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

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