Loudness of TV Commercials

Awakenist, you might trying Tivo. Then you can skip past the evil.

It's not just that they're louder - they are also highly compressed and limited so that the average level is almost the same as the maximum volume level. The sponsors want to be sure you hear all about male erectile disfunction while you head to the fridge for a beer during commercial break.

The NTSC TV system uses signals transmitted during the retrace interval at the end of several scan lines to signal TV stations on signal equalization and among other things, commercial cueing. I always wondered why no one built a TV that could read the cues and mute during commercials, or a video recorder that could use this info to skip commercials.

Ghostrider45,

My guess is that the brodcasters (who depend on revenue from the commecials) have better lobbiest that the consumer groups. I'm sure the broadcast industry would do everything in their power to prevent you from being able to simply skip past the commecials.

Enjoy,

TIC

You can skip commercials with Tivo-like devices. Also commercials come in fixed time lengths, it's very easy to manually scan past them. Since the overwhelming majority of TVs and home theater systems are remote controlled, the changing volume just isn't a big concern - you use the remote to change the volume. Philips applied for a patent earlier this year for a TV that freezes it controls whenever a commercial starts so you can't change the channel or the volume. They have no plans to implement this feature since they see no consumer demand for it.

Early versions of PVRs such as Replay TV did allow you to easily skip commercials. The networks threatened the manufacturers, and the feature was soon eliminated. There may be hacks available for PVRs. A Google search will probably find some.