I apologize that many of you are having uncomfortable and even downright unpleasant experiences with the volume of some of the advertising on Hulu. This is not by design, and we are working very hard to fix this lingering issue. There is a widespread belief that broadcasters, ourselves included, boost the audio levels of the commercials they play. This, however, is just a myth.

What follows is an explanation of how our new ad volume normalization system works, as well as some things you can do to help us make it even better.


First, how it works:

The new player begins analyzing the volume level of the content in the seconds leading up to an ad break. Then, as the ad is fetched, the player compares the precomputed volume of the ad with that of the recent content, and adjusts them dynamically to match.


The Recent Problems:

What appears to have been happening is that the analysis was being thrown off by a few different problems. The first, is that some of the ads were not being properly analyzed beforehand, negating our ability to adjust their audio level downward. This has been the major source of problems for the new system, and should be fixed as of this morning.

Many of you have also noted that our pre-roll ads -- the ads that run before a video begins -- are noticeably louder than the video. This was occurring because our system wasn’t checking the ad volume against the first several seconds of a video. We've made a few adjustments to address this issue and will continue to refine a long-term solution.

The last issue that seems to be affecting the system is that the volume may ramp up as a show heads into a commercial break (e.g. with an explosion or climactic scene of some kind). Unfortunately, this can sometimes trick the system, causing what appears to be an increase in ad volume compared to most of the video, but which is actually a failure to properly lower the volume.


Now, how can you help make it better?

We are taking this very seriously, and here's what you can do to help. To better debug the system, and fine-tune the algorithm used to compute the average volume, we need to know what shows are causing the volume discrepancies. So, if you encounter this issue again, it would be very helpful if you could tell us the following:
1. Which video you were watching (a link to the video would be great)
2. Which specific ad seemed louder than the content
3. Which ad break had the volume discrepancy

Thank you again for your support and feedback as we continue to work out these last kinks and refine our system.

Thanks,
Devin
Hulu Support