A Year After Ban On Loud TV Commercials: Has It Worked?

netbuzz writes "It's been a year since the FCC implemented the CALM Act, a law that prohibits broadcasters from blasting TV commercials at volumes louder than the programming. Whether the ban has worked or not depends on who you ask. The FCC notes that formal complaints about overly loud commercials are on the decline in recent months, but those complaints have totaled more than 20,000 over the past year."

Re:Cut the cord

[kimvette]

Oh, you're THAT GUY [theonion.com]!!

Re:No complaints here

[GumphMaster]

I Don't Own a TV [xkcd.com]

Re:loud quiet loud quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice conspiracy and you may be correct since we all know the sleaze in the ad business but at least for the wub-wub part, that is due to the current popularity amongst teens and young adults with dubstep music. A pic my daughter used to keep on her desktop said "Dubstep- my heart doesn't beat, it wobbles." For an old fuck like me, it is a truly horrendous musical genre that isn't welcome on my lawn. To imagine what it sounds like just envision what you might hear outside of a closed garage door that has 2 Transformers fucking inside. Good ol' Tranformer hate sex. This genre is popular amongst most of the nerd crowd so I dare not post this honest flame under my UID.

Re:loud quiet loud quiet

[zippthorne]

The problem could easily be solved by, instead of regulating the volume levels, regulating that the media companies cannot own the DVR companies.

The DVR companies would then compete on features, one of which being commercial skip. If the commercials are kind enough to make themselves easily identifiable by noticeably higher volume, the commercial skip feature of your typical DVR will be happy to use that data to accurately slice them out.

The war ends with commercials being better integrated with the content, either through product placement or through matching the style of the content they are inserted in.

That is, as long as the DVR producers are ideologically and financially separate from the companies selling the ads....

Re:loud quiet loud quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

A DVR?

What do I win?