Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California
Illinois passed a similar law, giving services more incentive to make ads less booming.
On July 1, it will be illegal for streaming platforms to play ads louder than the content being watched in California.
As The Hollywood Reporter highlighted this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill ( SB 576 ) in October 2025 that prohibits any video streaming service from transmitting the “audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany” in the state.
We haven’t seen any streaming services explain how they will comply with the California law or if they will apply the volume adjustments to US streams outside of California. Although streaming providers could opt to only apply volume adjustments to customers that they detect as being in California, it’s reasonable to expect companies to apply these changes elsewhere . As it stands, streaming services will already have to apply the ad loudness requirements to streams in Illinois by July 1, 2027, per a bill passed this month .
The Motion Picture Association, which includes Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime Video, and Paramount, and the Streaming Innovation Alliance, which includes Netflix, Disney, Peacock, and Pluto TV, opposed the bill. The groups argued that “many” streaming services were already trying to manage the “loudness of advertisements that come from server-side ad insertion that may be inconsistent with the loudness of the programs,” per a state Assembly analysis (PDF) from September 2025. Server-side ads can have differing volumes due to companies using various encoding pipelines.
Additionally, as the opposing groups previously pointed out, streaming services must contend with a broad range of output devices, including TVs, tablets, and phones.