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

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

#51
post #6

I found this to be an issue on YouTube. It wasn’t necessarily malicious. I often put on a no-talking video in the background while reading and the ad interruptions became really loud. I eventually just ended up subscribing, but this is great to see.

YouTube is a completely different experience once you pay to turn off the automated ads

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

#52

Instagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.

It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.

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

#54

Instagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.

It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.

It has always struck me as strange and user-hostile that most of the computing and entertainment world has decided to couple together the transition from SDR to HDR with a conceptually unrelated switch from relative to absolute brightness scales, and to not really make any effort to explain to users what's going on with that.

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

#55
post #45

Waiting for California to ban obnoxiously bright electronic billboards next. The meatspace could use some love too.

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont got this right by simply banning all billboards.

I never understood why we're OK with placing billboards, which by definition try their best to get you to look at them, next to the road, which we're supposed to look at.

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

#56
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 /…

Not “instead of” but “in addition to”. Government regulation is not perfect but is the first-best solution to imposing such injunctions, and prima facie is much more effective than social norms or industry self-regulation. That’s a major part of why the industry bodies are objecting to it.

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

#57
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.

It has always struck me as strange and user-hostile that most of the computing and entertainment world has decided to couple together the transition from SDR to HDR with a conceptually unrelated switch from relative to absolute brightness scales, and to not really make any effort to explain to users what's going on with that.

I think the main issue is devices treating SDR as inherently dim, and then upgrading HDR to extremely bright. I want my SDR white as bright as the brightest HDR white -- or at the very least configurable to that. Then HDR wouldn't be such a flashbang. And I wouldn't be leaving most of my display's capability on the table in daily use -- it's super annoying that my display is capable of more than doubling its brightness, but just doesn't, whenever I don't happen to be watching an HDR movie. To me, brighter is better as long as it preserves color accuracy. There are third-party apps to increase the display's brightness, but it causes weird issues on my MacBook's MiniLED display by making the cursor a noticeable drop in backlight intensity. Hopefully, the OLED MacBooks fix this, one of these years -- I always hated how obvious MiniLED's backlight zones are

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

#58
post #6

I found this to be an issue on YouTube. It wasn’t necessarily malicious. I often put on a no-talking video in the background while reading and the ad interruptions became really loud. I eventually just ended up subscribing, but this is great to see.

The ads sometimes being loud on YouTube usually doesn't bother me (except recently when it was an extra loud woman shouting something like "My husband fucked me all night last night" and proceeded to extol the virtues of the product that I am supposed to believe allowed for that bedroom performance--that was so annoying and it was so different from the ads they normally show me it earned YouTube a week with the ad blocker on [1]).

What I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.

With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?

[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.

For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.

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

#59
post #6

I found this to be an issue on YouTube. It wasn’t necessarily malicious. I often put on a no-talking video in the background while reading and the ad interruptions became really loud. I eventually just ended up subscribing, but this is great to see.

YouTube is a completely different experience once you pay to turn off the automated ads

Or use an ad blocker.

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

#60
post #4

Went on Instagram last week for 2-3 days, and found out an annoying pattern where just the beginning 1s or so of a video ad is loud and then the volume is normal. Doesn't occur on all Ads either.

This sounds like automatic gain correction, which is an appropriate solution to this problem. The only thing that IG could be doing better is to calculate the gain on the upcoming 1s instead of the previous. And actually, I would say that the correction should be punitive: if the stream volume crosses a certain threshold, a flat -6dB should be applied on top of the calculated correction.
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