We’ve all been there, completely absorbed in a movie or maybe your favorite comfort TV show is lulling you to sleep, when suddenly an ad blasts in like a jump scare at what sounds like double the volume and yanks you out of the moment.
Despite advertisers turning to cheap tricks to get your attention, a new California law aims to put an end to this annoying practice.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed on Monday state legislation that bans loud commercials on video streaming platforms, including Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max.
The law aims to close a loophole in the 2010 Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which banned blaring commercials on broadcast, cable, and satellite TV. But because streaming wasn’t yet mainstream, those platforms were left out at the time. Today, about 83% of U.S. adults use streaming services.
The new law also comes as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has said it’s been hearing from more viewers complaining about deafening ads. Back in February, the agency announced it was revisiting its decades-old rules from the CALM Act and seeking public comment on how to better protect consumers from excessively loud commercials. The FCC said complaints dropped after the rules first took effect, but in recent years they’ve started climbing up again with a “troubling jump” just last year.
Now, the California bill requires that streamers “not transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content they accompany.”
“We heard Californians loud and clear, and what’s clear is that they don’t want commercials at a volume any louder than the level at which they were previously enjoying a program,” Gov. Newsom said in a statement.
The bill was written by State Senator Tom Umberg, who said the idea came from one of his staffers struggling to put their baby, Samantha, to sleep because of loud commercials.
“This bill was inspired by baby Samantha and every exhausted parent who’s finally gotten a baby to sleep, only to have a blaring streaming ad undo all that hard work,” said Umberg.
The law faced some pushback from entertainment industry groups, which argued that streaming ads come from multiple sources, making them too difficult to control, and that the industry was already working on a fix.
Melissa Patack, a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents companies like Netflix, Paramount, and Disney, testified during a committee hearing in June.
“Unlike in the broadcasting cable network environment, where advertisers sell their ads directly to the networks, streaming ads come from several different sources and cannot necessarily or practically be controlled by streaming platforms,” Patack said at the time.
Set to take effect in July 2026, the law could influence national standards, given California’s size and close connections to the entertainment industry.
