California’s Streaming Loudness Law: Time for Ad Tech to Rethink Audio Control
A familiar broadcast rule is now entering the streaming world with California’s new loudness regulation SB 576, mandating that advertisements must match the perceived volume of the primary content surrounding them. The goal is to eliminate the sudden volume spikes viewers experience during ad breaks. On paper, it’s a win-win: audiences get a better viewing experience, and advertisers know their message is landing without jarring. But implementing that rule in streaming is far less simple than it sounds.
Unlike traditional broadcast, where a single operator controls the audio chain, streaming ads move through a fragmented ad-tech ecosystem before reaching the viewer. Ads may originate from broadcasters, programmatic marketplaces, or third-party ad servers, passing through multiple encoding and delivery systems along the way. Under California’s new regulation, the platform delivering the ad to viewers is ultimately responsible for ensuring loudness remains within regulated limits — regardless of where the ad originated.
That shift exposes a deeper industry reality: loudness control in streaming is no longer just a broadcast engineering issue. It has become an ad-tech supply chain problem.
Loudness considerations in dynamic ad insertion workflows
The issue becomes most visible in dynamic ad insertion, where advertisements are delivered in real time through complex ad-tech workflows. Two dominant approaches—client-side ad insertion (CSAI) and server-side ad insertion (SSAI)—create very different compliance considerations.
In CSAI environments, the viewer’s device pauses the content stream, retrieves an ad from an ad server, and plays it locally before returning to the program. While this architecture enables flexible targeting and rapid ad delivery, it also removes opportunities for the streaming platform to adjust audio before playback.
Ads in programmatic marketplaces often originate from many different production environments, each using different loudness targets, encoding practices, or metadata standards. Because CSAI ads are delivered directly to the playback device without guaranteed normalization or transcoding, platforms may have limited control over the audio characteristics of the ad itself.
As a result, CSAI compliance increasingly needs to begin upstream. Ad servers, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and programmatic marketplaces may need to enforce loudness normalization before ads enter circulation. Without consistent audio standards at the source, CSAI workflows will continue to carry compliance risk.
How SSAI enables greater loudness oversight
Server-side ad insertion presents a different picture. In SSAI workflows, advertisements are stitched directly into the video stream at the server level before the content reaches the viewer, producing a continuous output stream that resembles traditional broadcast playback.
However, SSAI is not immune to operational challenges. Programmatic ads frequently arrive seconds or milliseconds before insertion, leaving little time for re-encoding or correction. If ads arrive with inconsistent audio profiles or inaccurate metadata, the stitching pipeline must still compensate quickly enough to avoid interrupting playback.
In practice, SSAI provides greater control but only when supported by processing workflows capable of handling the speed and scale of modern streaming advertising.
Scaling loudness control in the streaming era
As streaming advertising placements continue to grow, traditional quality control is no longer practical. Thousands of ad assets may circulate across multiple platforms each day, making automated verification increasingly important.
Automated loudness management systems are becoming part of the streaming infrastructure itself. These systems measure audio levels using standards such as ATSC A/85 or ITU-R BS.1770, normalize audio where required, correct metadata inconsistencies, and validate outputs before distribution.
Automation can also identify non-compliant assets before they reach viewers. Ads that fail loudness checks can be corrected, flagged, or rejected entirely, reducing compliance risk for the platform responsible for delivery.
For CSAI ecosystems, this automation may need to exist within ad-tech platforms themselves, ensuring ads are normalized before they are requested by playback devices. For SSAI workflows, automated processing can operate within the stitching pipeline, ensuring every inserted ad meets the same loudness standards as the surrounding content.
A signal that streaming regulation is maturing
California’s move is unlikely to remain an isolated policy change. States with strong consumer-protection traditions are watching closely, and federal regulators may eventually revisit how CALM principles apply in a digital-first media environment.
For broadcasters and ad-tech providers alike, the lesson is clear. Loudness management can no longer be treated as a downstream adjustment or a viewer-side issue. It must be addressed across the entire advertising supply chain, from production through programmatic delivery.
Fixing the issue in California will prove a vital testing ground – and ultimately mark the beginning of a more consistent global baseline for audio quality across streaming media. For streaming platforms? Choose your audio partners carefully. Demand more from your ad-tech suppliers. For the wider ad-tech ecosystem: this is the moment to redefine expectations and demonstrate value as true partners.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Telos Alliance. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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