If you tried to watch the nightly news or a sports game on your local NBC station lately, you might have reached for the remote to turn the sound up. A weird bug is hitting YouTube TV right now. Subscribers all over the USA are complaining that the streaming platform drops the volume of NBC shows to nearly half the level of other channels.
Subscribers notice the platform cuts the audio level in half
People chatting on online message boards say the audio sounds muffled or extremely quiet. The glitch affects both local news broadcasts and big national events. When viewers switch from a different channel over to NBC, the sound drops so much that it becomes hard to hear basic conversations.
Because YouTube TV operates entirely over the internet, a small broadcast bug can reach households nationwide almost instantly. The company has not said exactly what is causing the drop in volume. However, clever internet users think it might have something to do with the exact type of audio file NBC sends out.
Missing surround soundtracks might cause sudden volume drops
Tech fans noticed that NBC might have stopped sending its full surround sound audio to the streaming service. Even without that main track, YouTube TV still tries to process the basic stereo sound as if it were a full theater setup. This mixing error squashes the audio track and makes it sound incredibly soft on most living room televisions.
Right now, tweaking the audio settings on your television or soundbar will not fix the root cause. The issue lives on the server side of the broadcast. The platform will likely need to push a fix from its own control rooms to get the local stations sounding normal again.
