Anyone who’s settled into a quiet evening of streaming, only to be jolted off the couch when an ad blasts in at twice the volume, is about to get some relief — at least in California. Starting July 1, 2026, it becomes illegal for video streaming services to transmit the audio of commercial advertisements louder than the content those ads accompany within the state.
The rule comes from California Senate Bill 576, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 6, 2025. In plain terms, it bars any video streaming service from blasting commercials at a higher volume than the show or movie you were actually watching.
If that sounds familiar, it should. Broadcast, cable, and satellite TV have lived under similar rules for years thanks to the federal CALM Act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation), which, per the FCC, requires commercials to run at “the same average volume as the programs they accompany.” SB 576 finally drags streaming into the same neighborhood.
And California isn’t alone. Illinois has passed its own measure, with streaming providers required to meet ad-loudness requirements there by July 1, 2027. With two states now in the mix, the platforms have a strong incentive to fix the problem rather than juggle region-by-region carve-outs.
Technically, this is harder than just turning a knob. Streaming services don’t simply splice in ads the way old-school TV did — they rely heavily on server-side ad insertion, stitching commercials into the stream from separate encoding pipelines. Because those ads pass through different processing chains than the main programming, their loudness can vary wildly. As trade publication TV Tech reported in December, providers “will need to integrate file-based and, in some cases, real-time processing and loudness control into their server-side commercial insertion workflow, just as they currently do for their primary programming.”
There’s also the device problem. A stream that sounds balanced on a living-room TV behaves differently on a tablet or a phone, and providers have to account for that entire spread of output hardware.
Unsurprisingly, the industry pushed back. The Motion Picture Association — whose members include Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime Video, and Paramount — and the Streaming Innovation Alliance, which counts Netflix, Disney, Peacock, and Pluto TV among its ranks, opposed the bill. They argued that “many” services were already wrestling with mismatched ad loudness caused by inconsistent encoding pipelines.
So far, no streaming service has publicly explained how it plans to comply, or whether it’ll apply the fix nationwide rather than geofencing it to California viewers. Given the engineering involved, a one-size-fits-all approach seems the likelier outcome.
Whether it actually works is another matter. The CALM Act hasn’t silenced complaints: the FCC logged at least 1,700 loudness gripes in 2024, up from roughly 825 in 2023 and about 750 in 2022. The lesson for streamers is clear — passing a law is easy; making ads behave is the hard part.
