Even California’s governor is fed up with obnoxiously loud advertisements that pop on when he’s streaming his favorite shows.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Monday that bans streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu from playing advertisements substantially louder than the programming they accompany.
Newsom signs hundreds of bills each year with little fanfare, reserving bill-signing announcements typically for only the measures that he and his team find the most noteworthy or in which the governor is personally invested.
He sent one out announcing he’d signed Senate Bill 576.
“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 wrote. “By signing SB 576, California is dialing down this inconvenience across streaming platforms.”
The law makes streaming platforms comply with the same standards as a 15-year-old federal law that limits how loud television and cable broadcasters can make their advertisements.
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 shows they accompany.
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.
Lawmakers don’t like loud ads
The bill wasn’t a tough sell for its author, Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg of Santa Ana. It passed the Legislature with none of California’s 120 legislators voting against it.
Umberg told CalMatters this summer that he came up with the idea for the bill after his legislative director, Zach Keller, told him about how a loud ad woke up his infant daughter, Samantha Rose, while the adults were trying to relax and watch a show.
“This bill was inspired by baby Samantha and every exhausted parent who’s finally gotten a baby to sleep, only to have a blaring streaming ad undo all that hard work,” Umberg said in a statement accompanying Newsom’s. “SB 576 brings some much-needed peace and quiet to California households by making sure streaming ads aren’t louder than the shows we actually want to watch.”
The measure faced opposition from California’s influential entertainment industry, including the Motion Picture Association of America, which has donated at least $204,000 to lawmakers since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database.
The opponents argued that the measure would be difficult to implement since streaming services don’t have the same control over ad volumes as traditional broadcasters.
