We’ve all been there. You’re watching a movie on Netflix or maybe a video on YouTube. You’ve got the volume just loud enough to hear everything without blowing your eardrums out. But then something terrifying happens. An ad plays. While that might be terrifying for some in its own right, the really scary thing is the fact that the ad plays at a volume much louder than your streaming content. Well, that won’t be a problem for much longer — at least not in California.
Thanks to a new law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom this week, any advertisements played on a streaming service will need to match the volume of the content being played. This law will only affect users in California, but hopefully it will pick up support in other states, and we’ll see similar rulings across the nation. The law goes into effect in July 2026, and in a statement made after the law’s signing, Senator Thomas Umberg noted that “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.”
A good move for streaming services
While ads have become far more common on streaming services in recent years — with many companies offering cheaper versions of their services with ads that play in the middle of shows and movies — the fact that these ads often play at different volumes can be intrusive and annoying. The new bill builds off of the rules put into play in 2010 by the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which passed at the federal level to regulate the volume of commercials on television networks. However, the CALM Act has never been updated to account for streaming services.
We did see an attempt to modernize and address this issue in Congress in 2023, but there doesn’t seem to have been much movement on it since. However, with California’s new bill, SB-576, there’s finally something to hold streamers accountable, at least in one U.S. state. The requirement goes into effect in July 2026, so there’s still plenty of time for streamers to get their jump scares in. That said, hopefully we’ll see Netflix, YouTube, and others embrace the change sooner rather than later.
