Many of you don’t remember, but there was a time on broadcast television when the commercials were so loud compared to the program that it became a real problem. TV watchers where constantly turning the volume level up and down with their remotes, and that led to thousands of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. Those complaints eventually led to passage of the CALM Act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act) by the U. S. Congress in 2010. That introduced the concept of LUFS levels in order to maintain the same volume level between commercials and the shows.
LUFS measures the perceived volume level of a program over its length and corresponds to the way we humans hear, so it’s different from any other level measurement commonly used by an audio mixer. The CALM Act mandated that all program broadcast by a network cannot be louder than -24 LUFS. Any program or commercial that exceeds that level could cause a television network to lose its broadcast license, something that no network was willing to risk.
As a result, we’ve had pretty much the same volume level from show to show, show to commercial, and network to network since. The law worked!
Until it didn’t.
It’s Different For Video Streaming
The problem was that today most people consume video from a streaming platform instead of a broadcast network. Pretty soon video streamers like Netflix and YouTube were playing commercials that would blast out of the player way louder than the program you were watching, just like on broadcast TV before 2010. The reason was that the CALM act does not apply to video streamers, only to broadcast networks.
Viewers noticed and were annoyed. As a result, people in California began to complain to their legislators, and last October California SB 576 was passed, essentially instituting a statewide version of the CALM Act aimed squarely at video streamers.
This bill prohibits Netflix, Prime Video, and other streamers from blasting commercial volume way above the level of whatever show or movie you’re watching in California.
Yes, SB 576 is not a federal law like the CALM Act, but it doesn’t have to be. Most of the video streaming platforms are located in California, and even if they weren’t, many of their customers are. It should be noted that New Jersey has recently passed a similar law.
SB 576 doesn’t go into effect until July 1st, 2026, which gives the streamers plenty of time to get ready for the change. That said, there’s no learning curve involved since both streamers and program/commercial suppliers went through this same thing more than a decade ago.
How It Affects Mixers
Every time I write something about LUFS I get a feed full of mixers freaked out about how this will effect them. The thing is, just like with broadcast, there’s only a single mixer on the hook for the proper level for either a commercial or video program. That’s the mixer/editor that delivers the final product to the network.
And that mixer/editor is not just shooting in the dark either. Every network and video streamer has a delivery specification sheet that’s sent to the mixer/editor to follow. Because the stakes are so high, if the program level is out of spec, it will get kicked back for a redo until it’s acceptable.
So if you’re a consumer of Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and any other video streaming service, you can rejoice in that there will finally be the same level sanity as we have with broadcast programming.
If you’re a mixer, SB 576 is worth noting, but it most likely won’t affect you one bit.