The HbbTV Consortium, founded to drive development of the pan-European connected TV specification HbbTV, is planning to go worldwide. It will launch a strategic marketing campaign to promote the standard on a global basis.
It looks like being a rather bloodless coup as the world rolls over against the advancing HbbTV hybrid broadcast standard. The opposition is fragmented and the HbbTV Consortium has done a good job at building bridges on the way as necessary, by joining forces with the Open IPTV Forum, (OIPF) and getting stuck into ATSC to have the technology incorporated in the next ATSC3.0 standard supporting hybrid broadcast. Now the consortium has decided it is time formally to move beyond its initial brief of fostering pan European adoption, by promoting the standard on a worldwide basis.
This campaign to accelerate worldwide deployment will be fronted by hybrid gurus Kirk Edwardson and R’gis Saint Girons, who were recently appointed co-chairs of the consortium’s marketing group.
HbbTV emerged around 2009 from the ashes of two European interactive TV standards, MHEG-5, adopted in the UK and MHP in Italy, which both failed to gain significant traction outside their home countries. France and Germany then came up with HbbTV at just the right time, recognizing the additional need to incorporate Internet connectivity on both set tops and connected TVs. HbbTV was founded on CE-HTML, a subset of XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language), slimmed down for the reduced computational resources of TVs or set tops, as compared with PCs.
HbbTV then took on board the OIPF specification for a set of JavaScript APIs capable of transforming static web pages for incorporation in an application environment. This allows interaction with the broadcast environment, for example to view channel lists and start recordings, as well as media streaming over IP. HbbTV then comes in by specifically linking these applications to DVB broadcasts, through AITs (Application Information Tables) associating applications with broadcast services, which may be triggered by zapping to a service.
Applications can be distributed over IP through URL links in these tables, or for receivers with no IP connection they may be carried in the broadcast streams themselves using DSMCC (Digital Storage Media Command and Control), which was initially designed as a toolkit for developing control channels associated with MPEG-2 streams. If an IP connection is present, applications can make use of internet services, such as catch-up TV. The latest HbbTV 1.5 version extends the scope beyond simple streaming, adding support for MPEG DASH adaptive streaming and DRM if required.
These technical developments have been paralleled by geographic advances. Kick off was in Germany in 2010 with deployments both on satellite, such as Astra HD+, and Free-To-Air terrestrial. HbbTV is also carried by cable operators such Telecolumbus and Primacom, and supported in the Kabelkiosk package.
France came next with public broadcaster France Television deploying an HbbTV-based VoD service and Eutelsat adopting it for its FranSat satellite platform. Since then it has spread across continental Europe and the Nordics, where the NorDig standards organization has dropped MHP and selected HbbTV 1.5 instead. Public service broadcaster, DR, has been running a pilot of its catch-up service on HbbTV.
Even in the UK, which has deployed YouView as its primary FTA hybrid platform outside the ambit of HbbTV, the CTV project driven by the Digital Technology Group is closely aligned with HbbTV 1.5, although is yet to be adopted by any platform operator, except for FreeSat, the free to satellite service in the UK.
Interest is now focused on progress outside Europe, with Malaysia and Vietnam having adopted HbbTV as part of their new hybrid terrestrial platform based on DVB-T2, while several other Asian countries actively considering it. The Russia Television and Broadcasting Network has been conducting HbbTV trials and announced deployment plans on the DVB-T2 network in 2013. Elsewhere progress is being made in other areas, including parts of Africa, that have already adopted DVB-T standards, while, as we have noted HbbTV is taking over North America by stealth through incorporation into ATSC 3.0.
HbbTV trials are also being conducted in Japan and China and if these lead to major deployments then the game is over, with only Latin America remaining to be conquered, which would require some kind of union with the ISDB-T terrestrial technology, though that doesn’t present technical difficulties, only political hurdles.