Speaker 1: I'm Bort Stearns of The Pulse Network at thepulsenetwork.com, we're here in our studios in Canton, Mass. Having a conversation with Andrew Sachs, who's the VP of Product Management of a company called Volicon. Andrew, if I go around the industry, your clients, broadcasters, networks, what's Volicon known for?

Speaker 2: Compliance logging. The FCC has been enforcing decency or captions or subtitling for a long time. For a while it was videotapes that you might have used to prove it, but with Volicon we really brought computer access and many other use cases to that application, but really fundamentally the stations and broadcasters ended up pulling that off of Volicon.

Speaker 1: While digital has changed things a lot, while the gadgets and technology, while the great content shift is going on, that'll be an exhibit, the NAB show has changed everything. Volicon's been a trusted name in the industry for a long time.

Speaker 2: Absolutely.

Speaker 1: So we've been talking a lot about compliance legislation, about loudness monitoring, and the law that's going to go into effect in December of 2012 here in the United States, and specifically about loudness of commercials. How are these going to be enforced when the law goes into place?

Speaker 2: Good question. I think we look at the patterns involving from decency and closed captioning and our experience with our very large customer base here and feel that it's going to follow a very similar pattern. Part of the challenge with loudness really is it's much more of a subjective judgment. So with decency or closed captioning, people's DVRs really can have sort of solid evidence of whether you were in violation or not. Loudness, people don't have loudness meters in their homes, and there can be perceptions of loudness that can generate complaints. So we think the FCC's pattern of taking the complaints, detecting patterns in them, and forwarding them to the people who delivered the television content is going to stay into place. The challenge here, though, is probably that there'll be many more, shall we say, armchair enforcers for loudness that won't necessarily know whether a channel is in compliance or not, but perceived as such. So I think loudness might have more of a challenge and more complaints for the legislation.

Speaker 1: So the direct question I want to ask you is about, in your opinion, what type of fines are going to come down? Are they going to be monetary? Are they going to be punitive? Whatever it is. But let me go back to the point you just made. When it comes to decency and closed caption, what type of penalties are given to broadcasters now when that happens?

Speaker 2: Money. Really? The bigger you are and the bigger the decency violation. I think Super Bowl, right, was probably one of the best, you know, the largest examples of indecency. And it was a large fine.

Speaker 1: The wardrobe malfunction?

Speaker 2: The wardrobe malfunction. Right?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: What did they get fined for that? I think it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Really? And really a lot more oversight. So not only is it a monetary fine, but it's also the cost, the litigation, the engagement with and the time that you have to spend addressing those complaints. So whether they're, you know, small scale, local things, you know, you don't want to spend your time and money, you know, either paying fines or having to engage the FCC in a complaint.

Speaker 1: Andrew, great conversation. Nice talking to you. Thank you. Yeah. Andrew Sachs from Volicon is all part of the great content shift, the discussion about that. And this is all part of talking about the 2012 NAB show. Thank you.