California extends loud ad rules to streaming services

Streaming viewers in California will soon get a direct fix for one of the most common viewer complaints: commercials that blast in louder than the program they interrupt. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 576 on October 6, 2025, and the law will take effect on July 1, 2026, extending federal-style loudness protections from broadcast TV and cable to ad-supported streaming services.

The new law closes a gap in the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, the federal measure Congress passed in 2010 and the FCC began enforcing through rules that took effect in December 2012. Those rules require commercials to have the same average volume as the content around them, but streaming platforms were never covered by the broadcast-era framework. SB 576 applies that standard to video streaming services that serve California consumers and carry commercial advertisements, putting Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Netflix and YouTube squarely inside the volume rules.

The California Senate approved the bill 38-0 after Assembly committee analysis described it as closing a loophole that had exempted streaming platforms from CALM Act requirements. The same analysis said the Motion Picture Association and the Streaming Innovation Alliance opposed the measure, arguing that broadcast-style loudness controls are not practical in the streaming environment and that many services already try to normalize commercial volume on their own.

The political push behind the bill was unusually specific. Newsom and Sen. Thomas J. Umberg of Santa Ana said it was inspired by a loud streaming ad that woke a sleeping baby named Samantha. That small family annoyance became a test case for whether California can regulate the way tech companies deliver ads into the living room, a question that matters because streaming has grown into the main place many households now watch commercial video.

Federal regulators have long treated loud ads as a consumer-protection issue rather than a mere annoyance. The FCC has said complaints dropped significantly after the CALM Act rules took effect, but in recent years the commission has again received thousands of complaints about loud commercials. The agency also relies heavily on consumer complaints to spot patterns, a sign of how difficult volume enforcement can be even when the rule itself is clear.