Sick of loud ads on Netflix? A proposed California law would turn down the volume

Ever been streaming a show or a movie and been jolted out of your entertainment reverie by an ad so loud it felt like it rattled the windows?

If California’s lawmakers have their way, those blaring commercials on streaming platforms might soon have the volume turned down.

A bill sailing through the Legislature with bipartisan support would prohibit online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu from cranking up the volume during commercials. The proposal would make the platforms comply with the same standards as a 15-year-old federal law that limits how loud traditional television and cable broadcasters can make their advertisements.

Senate Bill 576 hasn’t been a very tough sell for its author, Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana, despite opposition from California’s influential entertainment industry.

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“This is the most popular bill I’ve introduced this year,” Umberg said in an interview with CalMatters.

Case in point: Every senator who was present that day voted for the bill when Umberg brought it to the Senate floor in late May. Umberg appealed to their annoyance.

“I’m guessing that all of you have been annoyed when you’re … streaming television, and a commercial comes on and it is exponentially louder than the other shows,” Umberg told his colleagues.

He glanced around the chamber. “You see heads nodding aye.”

President Barack Obama signed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act in 2010, which gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to issue rules ensuring that the average volume of TV commercials does not exceed the volume of the programming they accompany, according to the bill’s analysis. It notes that streaming services were still nascent at the time. Members of Congress have since tried to add streaming platforms to the law, but two 2023 federal bills didn’t get hearings.

Umberg’s bill aims to make streaming services in California follow the same rules despite Congress not yet taking action.

But would it be legal for California to do so?

UC Berkeley Law Professor Tejas Narechania told CalMatters that federal courts have ruled “that the California Legislature could enact consumer protections aimed at California residents, even if they affected out-of-state content providers.”

Narechania cited a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of a California deaf-rights organization that sued CNN for violating state law by failing to put closed captioning on videos it had on its website.

Umberg: Don’t wake the baby! 

While a significant amount of legislation comes to lawmakers through lobbyists pitching their proposals, this one came to Umberg from a baby. Well, the baby’s parents anyway.

He said his legislative director, Zach Keller, has an infant daughter named Samantha Rose. The baby had finally settled down to sleep and her parents, in turn, settled down to relax and watch a show when an ad came on so loud it woke the baby.

“Her father, at the behest of the baby’s mother, brought a bill idea to me,” Umberg said. “I thought, ‘That’s a good bill idea,’ so we introduced it.”

The plight of parents with sleeping babies hasn’t been enough to ward off opposition to the bill from California’s entertainment industry, including the Motion Picture Association of America. It has donated at least $204,000 to lawmakers since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

Opponents, including the Streaming Innovation Alliance, argue that the proposal would be difficult for streaming services to implement.

Streaming service ads don’t work the same way as commercials at cable and television networks, Melissa Patack, a representative for the Motion Picture Association, told the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee last month.

“When you choose a program on your streaming service, you’re actually calling up a digital file and advertising is paired up with that in real time,” she said. “The streaming platform may not be able to control the loudness of a particular ad.”

Patack added that the streaming industry has done “a significant amount of work” already to “address loudness issues and develop best practices to match the loudness of ads with programming.”

Umberg isn’t buying it.

“I have a great deal of faith in the entertainment industry, in the technology that they both currently use and are developing, that if they can make ads louder, they can make them less loud,” he said.

Umberg’s bill now moves to the Assembly floor where Umberg is again likely to appeal to lawmakers’ desire for streamers not to wake up more babies such as Samantha Rose.