The Regulation of Advertisement Loudness in Television Broadcast: The Global Context and the Czech Regulation

The thesis focuses primarily on the legal aspects of the regulation of the loudness of television broadcast, especially in connection to the issue of loud advertisement. First, technical specifics and aspects of sound production and monitoring of broadcast loudness are introduced. The following chapters are devoted to the international context of loudness regulation, mainly in connection to ITU and EBU, and to an analysis of the ways in which loudness regulation has been put into practice in selected countries (USA, France, and Poland). The second half of the thesis focuses on the history of regulation of television broadcast in the Czech Republic and how it found its way into the Czech legal code. Significant initiatives are introduced, as well as proposed laws and regulations, activities of the Czech regulatory body RRTV, the broadcasters' criticism, the final versions of the law and of the regulation, the actual impact on the Czech TV broadcast, the results of loudness measurements and the expected development in the future