• plz1@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    They are repeating the cable/broadcast ad service network playbook. All this shit has already been regulated on normal TV, and wasn’t an issue with streaming because before, streaming didn’t have ads like this. Now that they’ve normalized paying monthly fees AND being lasted with ads, the regulation has to play catch-up again. This should be something the FCC regulates, but good luck in this administration.

    • voidsignal@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      only that you now pay each channel $too-much a month. genius! my seedbox has been back at it for a while now

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        After my parents quit smoking, they ended up with this, IDK, “born again nonsmoker” attitude where they were completely disgusted by the smell of cigarette smoke and couldn’t stand to be around it at all.

        I have the same attitude about ads.

        • T. Hex@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 hour ago

          Doesn’t smoking suppress your sense of smell? I wonder if they couldn’t smell how bad it is while they were still smoking.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            47 minutes ago

            Yep, but the key is that you become more sensitive to it after doing it and quitting than before you started.

      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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        4 hours ago

        When I go to the office instead of being on my home network with a pihole, and I go to show a website in a meeting, I’m just embarrassed by what shows up because the site didn’t look anything like that when I was looking at it previously at home. I legitimately don’t know how people actually use websites that are 80% ads

        • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          I was fortunate enough to have some creative input into our browser policies at work. Needless to say, Adnauseum ublock origin and some password safe extensions got added to the allow list

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Ya, I get that. I have to stop myself from being weird and overly aggressive about it when watching tv at a friend’s house.

    • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      I love this idea but nowadays I’m actively looking for commercials in many shows—watching Sealab or Family Guy or Space Ghost or super old Pokémon and the like is infinitely better with original commercials from the late 90s or early 2000s, ripped in mediocre quality from an SP VHS.

  • xkbx@startrek.website
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    6 hours ago

    Okay, so I have no idea about streaming services, but commercials on broadcast TV never had the volume increased but the compression.

    (I love getting lost in details so apologies if any of this comes off condescending.) Compression works by making the quieter parts louder, without distorting the louder parts.

    THINK of a SENTENCE where SOME of the WORDS are LOUD and OTHER words are QUIETER.

    compression works by squishing down all the loud parts, then bringing everything back up to full volume, so the previous sentence would become:

    THINK OF A SENTENCE WHERE SOME OF THE WORDS ARE LOUD AND OTHER WORDS ARE QUIETER.

    Now, the loud parts didn’t become louder. What happened is that the quieter parts got louder. You lose the dynamic, but gain volume. If you think it would just be exhausting, you’re correct - even at low volumes, you can get a sense of ear fatigue when audio is heavily compressed.

    Now, if you want to know why movies have quiet parts where you can’t hear shit and loud parts that are way louder, this is called dynamics. Artistically, you very much want this for the same reason you want quiet parts and loud parts in classical music. If everything is constantly loud, the dramatic moments won’t feel as impactful.

    “But wait, I don’t enjoy that, I like having my TV at a reasonable volume!” Yup, me too. It’s fucking annoying. Mixing is done often on high quality speakers, loud volume, so you can get every detail. Most home setups dont have that nuance, and most people don’t care. Until execs can actually get proven that they’ll make more money by having consistent compression, you’re shit out of luck. You’ll probably have to get your own compression, either through software or hardware.

    Source: used to work in sound engineering.

    • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.ch
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      3 hours ago

      I thought you were going to get into lossy audio compression codecs. I don’t see ads but when I do my ears are like “what in the 128 Kbps MP3 is going on here?”

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Thank you for giving the explanation so I didn’t have to (used to work in broadcast TV including sound and station engineer)

    • radiofreebc@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      This.

      Source: i still work in sound engineering. This is all about compression. Commercials are brickwalled to shit.

    • Tim_Bisley@piefed.social
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      6 hours ago

      I notice the sports betting commercials they engineer the sound to project the voices in loud environments like a bar. Its annoying as hell at home.

  • WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    The first thing my wife and I did this morning when we woke up was turn on streaming shit and check to see if they actually did this…

    We of course live in California and I am happy to report that the first commercial that played was loud as hell. My wife immediately started trying to find the phone numbers so that we could call and complain lol

  • daannii@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Hulu used to do it. idk if or when they stopped. But it was the primary motivator for me to buy the no-, commercial package.

    (That was till I swore off and went full pirate a few years ago.)

    But honesty, I never put two and two together.

    They almost certainly were doing it to ramp up the unpleasantness of the commercials to push people to pay more to avoid them.

    Fuckers

  • iocase@lemmy.zip
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    4 hours ago

    They even figured out a way to get around decibel laws.

    Human hearing is most sensitive within a certain range where we disproportionately hear those sounds louder than other frequencies. Advertisers would boost that range up and cut frequencies elsewhere to lower the average energy in the audio wave to be compliant with advertisement decibel ratings. The perceived sound could be multiple times louder than the intended limit.

    • radiofreebc@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Compression is the way this happened. Commercials are HEAVILY compressed, and shows aren’t. It’s not volume…it’s compression ratios.

      • iocase@lemmy.zip
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        1 hour ago

        Well yeah it’s squashing the dynamic range but it’s also more than that since they aren’t doing it evenly across the spectrum. They bias up the high gain frequencies for human hearing, and bias down the frequencies that are low perceived gain for human hearing.

  • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    My parents forced us to mute TV commercials as a kid and I’m so thankful they did.