Another consortium of European broadcasters and technology suppliers is about to attack the same space as the UK’s Project Canvas ‘ trying to create a standardized set top box that can accept both internet content and DVB-T (like the UK service Freeview) style content and bring them to a TV screen. The pressure coming from local pay TV rivals, such as Sky, and the continuing argument that the BBC (one of the main proponents of Canvas) should not artificially be allowed to dominate new technology areas, due to its huge Government subsidies, could mean that Canvas will now falter.
This new initiative operating under the name of ‘Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV’ or ‘HbbTV’, takes in mostly French and German organizations including broadcasters Canal+, France Televisions, and TF1 as well as German Institut f’r Rundfunktechnik, satellite operator SES ASTRA, and software providers ANT and OpenTV.
ANT supplies browsers and other higher level software inside set top boxes and has its software in millions of devices around the world, while OpenTV created the standard software to manage satellite TV set tops and is now owned by Nagravision, one of the biggest suppliers of conditional access.
For our money it is a far more natural thing for a group of international suppliers and broadcasters, along with pay TV operations to undertake, than a government sponsored public TV broadcaster, and less likely to distort the internet video market economically.
At present Canvas is being pushed by the BBC, ITV, Channel Five and local telco BT. There are lots of these partnerships around Europe between companies that should be entering this space as rivals but instead try to be partners, for instance where the local incumbent telco wants to partner up with the public service broadcaster, in order to ensure success. We have seen similar partnerships in Spain and Italy, and usually the European Commission comes down in favour of increased competition and insists on them being separated.
If the BBC, which gets $5 billion each year to make programming, paid for out of a compulsory public TV license, was to dictate the terms of the use of Canvas it could be disastrous for broadcast TV in Europe. If the BBC Trust, responsible for deciding what does and what does not need deeper scrutiny at the BBC, simply ushers Canvas through (as it seems to be trying to do) without a public value test, it will have made a major blunder.
Quite simply this can be seen in the proposed business models of the two organizations, with Project Canvas intent on using the set top to push only free to air models and HbbTV, opening its remit wider.
We have to ask ourselves whether the mission is to tie ALL DVB protocols, including DVB-S and DVB-C as well as DVB-T, to the internet or is it only the DVB-T protocol (as in Project Canvas) that needs to come as a hybrid with internet delivered TV.
Surely the chip vendors, most notably Intel with its CE 3100, are the first port of call in making a hybrid set top standard. That chip is almost certainly powerful enough to use to drive TV internet interconnection down from the $300 per device premium that it has today, to a $3 chip cost, with a few additional layers of software ‘ and after all that’s really all that the BBC and BT requires so that its systems are cheap to the consumer.
In the end the Project Canvas and HbbTV should merge and become open to all broadcasters using the DVB stack of protocols and then all the TV and set top manufacturers would join overnight. Failure to do this will split CE interest levels and could result in both failing.
The HbbTV technology is likely to have to deal with video in encrypted form because some of its members are pay TV suppliers, but by simply separating out the security function (a bit like cablecard has in the US or CI plus cards), all existing conditional access firms could continue to work with such a standard device. Of course security to ensure that these set tops did not play pirated internet content, or which could protect content end to end over the internet, is tougher to introduce, hence Canvas opting for the simpler design point of just converting the video to play on TVs, and then only from established broadcasters.
Meanwhile this new HbbTV specification is almost ready and is based on elements of existing standards and web technologies including OIPF (Open IPTV Forum), CEA, DVB and W3C.
The resulting device design could and should head off Canvas at the pass and come with full European support. While it’s true that the UK has the most established DVB-T service, countries like France and Italy are catching up fast.
Set tops that come out of HbbTV should suit the delivery of catch-up TV services, video on demand (VoD), interactive advertising, TV personalisation, voting, game delivery and social networking on your TV, all of which sound significantly better thought out than Project Canvas, and opens it to far more business models.
Implementations of HbbTV in Germany will be on display at the IFA show this week in Berlin, showcasing applications from public broadcasters such as ARD and ZDF who are supporting this development and will give a first detailed impression of the broadcasters’ service concepts.
HbbTV also promises to resolve the issue of what to do with aging teletext systems (text on the TV screen) which look ghastly in HD, and a new format for this will also be introduced at the same time.
Already the German broadcaster RTL has said this week it will introduce a new text service using the HbbTV standard, called HD Text, next year. HD Text will also be available on regular SD broadcasts but consumers will need a TV receiver or set-top box which is capable of handling CE-HTML. Of course it will make text based HTML pages look a lot better too.
While in the UK Teletext is fairly limited, in some European countries like Germany and France, it is made use of widely with millions of people using it each day. Most European teletext services have now shifted to the internet, but are still available on TV sets. So this set top can ride into those countries on the back of continuing to support this service by making it readable on HD screens.
There are no products to buy yet, but they are promised a full six months ahead of Canvas and if they expand into the UK by attracting a single broadcaster, and eat up Project Canvas potential, then HbbTV could easily undermine the UK initiative.
In France, support for HbbTV has come from the HD-Forum and the local regulators and the next step is to establish a patent pool for licensing all the relevant technologies.