CALM Act Compliance
Key Benefits
- Uses BS.1770-1 loudness measurement algorithm and provides the results in units of LKFS
- Continuously measure all programs' audio loudness and dialnorm values
- Store thumbnail images of programs to correlate alarms with video content
- Advanced BI and reporting engine allows to long-term historic compliance reporting
In December 2011, the FCC issued the regulations for the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act or CALM Act. The CALM Act was created to normalize audio loudness between TV programs and inserted advertisements thus alleviating viewers from loud and annoying commercials. In Canada, the CRTC announced its own Advertisement Loudness plans, with its Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2011-584. Both plans call on providers to adopt the ATSC A/85 Recommended Practice for maintaining a steady audio loudness across digitally inserted programs (i.e., TV programming and advertisements). Now, broadcasters, cable operators, telecommunications companies and other multichannel video program distributors (MVPD) have until December 2012 to put the solutions in place to adhere to these regulations.
IneoQuest offers a robust solution that provides 24/7 real-time monitoring and analytics of audio loudness for TV programming and digitally inserted commercials to ensure broadcasters and MVPDs are in compliance with the CALM Act and the coming CRTC 2011-584 regulations, both of which are based on the ATSC A/85 Recommended Practice. The combination of IneoQuest's cAIR and Expedus® DVA® IP allows providers to report on the advertisements that are in violation and why.
Expedus DVA, the award-winning QoS and QoE probe, is the cornerstone of IneoQuest's CALM Act compliance solution. Expedus DVA is positioned in the network headend, where it monitors the video feeds from content suppliers and verifies if the measured loudness of the video matches the dialnorm. Expedus DVA can also help providers ensure that local ad insertion adheres to CALM Act regulations by monitoring after the ad insertion point in their network. The IneoQuest solution also captures thumbnail images of the video that it monitors, allowing operators to quickly and easily correlate monitoring data with what video asset was being played.
IneoQuest's cAIR, Ad Insertion Analytics and Reporting solution, collects performance data from Expedus DVA, verifying that commercial insertions took place on schedule and monitors their quality. It also allows providers to import ad schedules for ads that will be inserted. cAIR uses the schedules and the quality measurements and thumbnails gathered by DVA to monitor ad quality and archive those programs where ads are inserted, giving providers a robust engine for long-term reporting and analytics of their ad insertions and CALM Act compliance.
