CALM Act Draft Seeks Comment on FCC Complaint Process for Loud TV Ads
The FCC is starting to implement rules to tamp down the volume of ads so they're not startlingly louder than the shows they appear within. Agency and industry officials said a draft rulemaking notice seeks comment on putting into place the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act. The CALM Act was passed by Congress in December (CD Dec 6 p8), and applies to TV stations and subscription-video providers. A Media Bureau rulemaking notice circulated May 5 may be voted on within the next few weeks and has already attracted lobbying at the commission from telco-TV providers, cable and broadcasters, FCC and industry officials said.
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The notice discusses procedures for handling consumer complaints about ads that are significantly louder than regular programming, FCC officials said. In addition to raising questions about the complaint process, the draft noted that the regulator can take a variety of enforcement steps, including fines, for spots that are too loud, they said. Broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors each are responsible for the ads they originate, a commission official noted. The draft rulemaking “focuses on compliance, waivers and other implementation issues,” a bureau spokeswoman said.
The rulemaking asks about some contractual terms of deals between MVPDs and cable programmers, another FCC official said. The item is said to ask about how pay-TV companies can enforce contracts, and it asks about indemnification clauses in some of them. The FCC must adopt rules within a year of the act’s passage, with an effective date for the rules within another year. Waivers for “financial hardship” can be granted for a year and extended for up to another 52 weeks, the bill said, at http://xrl.us/bkpr6n. Although the act says all parties are responsible for the ads they originate, TV stations appear to be ahead of cable operators because of equipment installed in advance of the 2009 full-power broadcaster digital transition, commission officials said.
Both broadcast and MVPD interests have lobbied the bureau and commissioners’ offices in advance of the rulemaking being voted on, agency and industry officials said. Some MVPDs have expressed concern that enforcement of the act not be over broad, and that it only apply to commercials the operators originate, agency officials said. As long as cable and other pay-TV operators have installed the proper equipment, the argument goes, they shouldn’t be held accountable for changing the loudness of commercials coming from national cable networks or elsewhere. Some lobbying the commission have noted they're already in compliance, FCC officials said.
Executives from the American Cable Association, Comcast-controlled NBCUniversal, NCTA and Verizon are among those that have discussed the act with FCC staffers, agency and industry officials said. Some nonprofit groups also have met with the bureau, its spokeswoman said. Because the rulemaking hasn’t begun, and there’s no docket for the proceeding, ex parte filings need not be filed. Representatives of the ACA, NCTA and Verizon had no comment.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee began working on recommendations for loudness in 2007 after it “recognized there was a problem,” coming out in 2009 with ATSC A/85 that’s now made mandatory in the act, said NBCUniversal engineering executive Jim Starzynski. A/85 is called Recommended Practice: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television. Many cable channels, TV stations and some broadcast networks are using a loudness standard that aims to have ads no more than 2 decibels louder than the programming they follow, Starzynski said. “At the point of 1 decibel, that’s the point at which your ears can just discern a difference.” At NBCUniversal, where he’s principal audio engineer, the NBC broadcast networks, the several dozen stations owned by the company and its cable channels try to keep it to that level, Starzynski said: That’s so the volume of ads “are nice and uniform.”