AES San Francisco 2012
Broadcast and Streaming Media Session B8
Saturday, October 27, 2:00 pm — 4:00 pm (Room 131)
B8 - Loudness and Metadata—Living with the CALM Act
Chair:Joel Spector, Freelance Television and Theater Sound Designer - Riverdale, NY, USA
Panelists:
Florian Camerer, ORF - Austrian TV - Vienna, Austria; EBU - European Broadcasting Union
Tim Carroll, Linear Acoustic Inc. - Lancaster, PA, USA
Stephen Lyman, Dolby Laboratories - San Francisco, CA, USA
Robert Murch, Fox Television
Lon Neumann, Neumann Technologies - Sherman Oaks, CA, USA
Robert Seidel, CBS - New York, NY, USA
Jim Starzynski, NBC Universal - New York, NY, USA
Abstract:
The Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act was signed by President Obama in 2011. Enforcement by the FCC will begin in December of this year.
Television broadcasters and Multi-Channel Video Program Distributors (MVPDs) are required to put in place procedures, software and hardware to “effectively control program-to-interstitial loudness … and loudness management at the boundaries of programs and interstitial content.” Objective data must be supplied to the FCC to support compliance with the legislation as well as timely resolution of listener complaints. Similar rules have been developed in the UK and other parts of the world.
Members of our panel of experts have worked tirelessly to either create loudness control recommendations that have become the law or to bring those recommendations to implementation at the companies they represent. This session will cover the FCC’s Report and Order on the CALM Act, the development of the ATSC’s A/85 Recommended Practice that is now part of the U.S. legislation, and both domestic and European technical developments by major media distributors and P/LOUD.
