People have been complaining about the volume of TV commercials since the 1960s and something is finally being done about it.  Congress has passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act which finally gives the FCC the power to make advertisers stop trying to shock us into paying attention to their commercials with really loud volume.

I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasion that I watch TV, I mute the tv as soon as commercials are about to come on.  I do this because the commercials are loud and annoying and because the product is almost never relevant to me.  Finally the government is finally doing something to fix at least one of these complaints although unfortunately it is going to be a while before the changes really show up.

Although the FCC will have this awesome new power as soon as Obama puts pen to paper on the bill, apparently they have a year to come up with volume standards for the industry to obey and then another year for the TV industry to make the changes necessary to make this problem go away.  I guess if people have been patient enough to wait 50 years for the government to solve the problem, they can wait another 2 years for the problem to completely go away.  At least now commercials shouldn’t exceed the average loudness of the tv program you are watching.

Now if only we could get this same rule for pre-roll ads on internet videos, I would be partying in the streets.