The HbbTV Association hopes that its long awaited version 2.0 will rekindle the drive that saw the hybrid broadcast standard sweep through continental Europe and penetrate the Far East during the first two to three years after its launch in 2010. The main additions in HbbTV 2.0 are full incorporation of HTML5, companion device interactivity and support for the HEVC codec along with Ultra HD delivery.
The new version has been under development ever since version 1.5, the first major upgrade, appeared during 2012, gaining final approval from ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) in November that year.
HTTP adaptive streaming based on the then emerging MPEG DASH standard was the main advance of HbbTV 1.5.This came with support for multiple DRM technologies providing they were based on the MPEG CENC (Common Encryption) standard, which was important given that DASH enabled streaming to multiple devices using a variety of content protection mechanisms.
There was a widespread perception at the time of the version 1.5 launch that HbbTV had seen off competitors and become the “de facto” global standard for hybrid TV and interactivity. So having begun as a Franco-German initiative primarily for interactive TV in 2008 it gained full adoption for hybrid broadcast in other continental European countries, including Spain and Poland, followed by endorsement in the Nordics when NorDig in 2012 decided to replace the DVB’s MHP with HbbTV as the common API for its advanced Integrated Receiver and Decoder. At the same time there was serious interest expressed in most of the world’s key TV markets, including the US, Russia, China and Japan, with announcements of trials.
It is certainly true that HbbTV had seen off its two principal European competitors developed for TV interactivity and common media presentation, MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) from the DVB and MHEG-5 embraced by the Multimedia and Hypermedia Experts Group (MHEG). The latter was selected as the interactivity standard for CI+ compliant TVs and other devices, but otherwise both have been forced back to their heartlands.
MHEG5 was adopted by Freeview in the UK and became the basis for the red button services there. Incidentally BSkyB, now Sky Europe, adopted the proprietary Open TV standard that has since been acquired by Nagra as the foundation for its interactive services, also known as red button. But even in the UK, the Digital Technology Group subsequently added an HbbTV profile to its D-Book Spec, casting doubt over the future of MHEG5.
Meanwhile MHP became confined to Italy, but there too the writing is on the wall now. The country’s Confindustria Radio Televisioni released a position paper in August 2014 stating that Italian broadcasters intended to migrate from DVB-MHP to HbbTV 2.0 as their preferred digital TV middleware, as soon as convenient. Italy’s soon to be released HD-Book 3.0 will retain MHP for now, but the plan is to endorse HbbTV 2.0 as the standard middleware in HD-Book 4.0. The release of HD-Book 4.0 is driven by the availability of the ‘UHD-1 Phase 2′ technical specification from DVB in order to be able to support UHD services, and so is not likely to be available until late this year or early 2016.
So here the DVB has had to concede defeat again, as it did when its proposed standard for a cable TV return path was defeated by DOCSIS, heralding migration towards IP. One of HbbTV’s strengths is that it was early to embrace all forms of TV delivery.
Meanwhile HbbTV has spread across Eastern Europe beyond Poland, gaining adoption in the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well. Its European hegemony is therefore beyond dispute, set for total coverage over the next few years with all competitors fallen by the wayside.
The bigger question is whether it will win global dominance and there momentum had seemed to be slipping. In the US interest in HbbTV seemed to be waning with growing traction for the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) A/105 “Interactive Services” system, which was elevated to status of Candidate Standard in December 2013. This is a direct competitor to HbbTV, being designed to converge Internet delivered and broadcast content within a single interface.
Since then progress has been slow, with little sign of A/105 completing the next steps to becoming a “Proposed Standard,” and then on to full-fledged ATSC Standard. There has also been little enthusiasm for the standard outside the US. Meanwhile HbbTV has continued to gain some ground, with adoption in Malaysia during 2013 followed by Australia for its Freeview platform in 2014. HbbTV then gained valuable publicity during the recent 2015 Australian Tennis Open when the Seven Network and Yahoo!7 promoted the platform as their vehicle for showing matches on all 16 courts simultaneously, accessible from connected mobile devices as well as TVs.
HbbTV has made recent progress in the Middle East and North Africa region with its adoption by Arabsat and Selevision. The two in September 2014 announced a partnership to deliver the first HbbTV service to the region from Media City in Jordan, Du in United Arab Emirates and Overon in Spain. The online component Arabsat comes from the Selevision OTT platform.
The main competition for HbbTV now comes not from a rival hybrid/interactive TV standard, but the great OTT phenomenon. It is encumbered by the same problems as all major standards initiatives in keeping up with what is actually happening on the ground. We now have zappers and all sorts of alternative ways of getting content to the big screen, including dongles and a growing amount of content consumed directly off the Internet via Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and many others.
HbbTV will work with broadcast only or online only services but its main proposition is as a hybrid standard, so that is where it needs to establish a stronghold. It looks like doing that given its strong backing from the European Broadcasting Union and growing following now among broadcasters in the rest of the world, with the DVB now aligning its efforts with HbbTV.
In fact HbbTV 2.0 incorporates the DVB CI Plus 1.4 specification, which itself adds key hybrid features such as support for multiple encrypted streams and the ability to route IP streams through the CI Plus CAM module. There is also support for IP multicast, so that taken together these features enable delivery of IPTV services direct to TV sets without a set top. HbbTV 2.0 therefore for the first time provides the foundation for coherent fully integrated IPTV/OTT services, combining IP multicast with DASH streaming. The first TV sets supporting CI Plus 1.4 are expected to arrive during 2015.
Another key addition in CI Plus 1.4 is a hook for forensic watermarking, designed to combat content redistribution. Under an OTT service with unicast distribution, each stream can carry a watermark which can then be recovered to pinpoint the user or device from which any un-authorized redistribution originated. However it is not possible to do this for multicast content, because there are multiple recipients of a given server-side stream, but CI Plus 1.4 enables say a smartcard identifier to be embedded into the decoded video from the CAM module, allowing operators to detect which subscriber is leaking multicast content. In that way CI Plus 1.4 provides the hybrid component for watermarking.
Among other features in HbbTV 2.0, support for advanced subtitling with improved timing based on the TTML (Timed Text Mark-up Language) and also support for companion applications like display of associated information, voting, play to screen, were overdue. The same could be said of support for UHD and HEVC, although few, if any, broadcasters have yet to announce significant deployments of these.
The support for synchronization of apps between TVs and connected devices is significant, since it is clear that apps will play a big role in content delivery, more so than browsers for mobiles devices and possibly even smart TVs. It means broadcasters can deploy HbbTV as their complete multiscreen platform confident that it will work on all target devices.
One other thing the HbbTV Association has got right this time is to make a comprehensive test suite available early on. Lack of test tools held up some deployments of HbbTV 1.5 and may have contributed to loss of momentum outside Europe. Now the association has immediately launched the tender process for the supply of an HbbTV 2.0 Test Suite, aiming to have this available in 2016 in time for launch of HbbTV 2.0 compliant products and services later that year.