Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
16 FA L L 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y The revised ATSC A/85 did not start with a regulator. It started with us. The Cinema Audio Society asked ATSC to clarify rules that were being widely misread in delivery specs, and while that request was working through the process, California passed legislation, effective July 1, 2026, extending the CALM Act to video streaming services. Illinois has since passed its own version. Nobody is going to author a California cut and a rest-of-country cut, so in practical terms, A/85 now governs streaming nationally. A small revision team, a re-recording mixer, a streaming specialist, and a codec expert, turned the update around quickly and it was accepted without technical challenge. Jim Starzynski walked through the result at SVG in July: a new Annex L with guidelines specific to internet streaming, and Annex M, a one-page tear-out summary aimed squarely at the people who actually write spec sheets. Alongside it sits AES TD 1009, a 40-page open document covering dialogue intelligibility across the whole chain, from human hearing through Ask Me Anything: Loudness Standards and Dialogue Intelligibility Events Wrap-Up content creation to the down-firing speakers in the back of a modern TV. That is the context for the first CAS Ask Me Anything, held July 25 with Marc Fishman CAS and Jon Greasley CAS, moderated by Charles Dayton CAS MPSE. Jon chairs the CAS Industry Technical Standards Committee and co-authored the A/85 revision. For the first session of these new AMA events, the authors and architects of the new specification made themselves available to the membership for an hour and a half on a Saturday morning and answered whatever was put to them. Ask Me Anything is meant literally, and the questions came from members working on exactly the deliverables the standard governs. 1770 Is Not a Spec Early in the session the panel drew the distinction between the specification and the measurement method. ITU-R BS.1770 is a measurement methodology. ATSC A/85 is the practice recommendation. A spec sheet that says "deliver per 1770" has told you nothing, because 1770 does not specify a target level or which element you anchor to. A/85 does, and A/53 then mandates that the dialnorm value in your metadata match the loudness you reported. Put those together and dialogue-anchored measurement is enforceable by law. Not everyone has caught up. Several major distributors still measure full program, and at least one measures act by act, which is close to the worst possible choice: set up your plot for three acts, let everything break loose in the fourth, and the algorithm decides your dialogue should get quieter. Anchor to full program across a season and you can see 8 dB of dialogue variation between a talky episode and an action episode of the same show. The committee is now writing to plugin manufacturers and distributors on exactly this point. The plugin vendors have been delighted to receive it. The distributors, predictably, less so, and the one genuine success so far came from sitting in a room rather than sending an email. b y C e r i T h o m a s C A S Moderator Charles Dayton CAS MPSE with panelists Jon Greasley CAS and Marc Fishman CAS during the first CAS Ask Me Anything.