HbbTV 2.0: Could This Standard Become the Future of Television?

The next version of HbbTV is bringing a much more powerful toolset with it, and has the potential to change the current worldwide television landscape.

By Nicolas Weil

HD Forum Releases TNT 2.0 Specifications and Conformance Tests

HD Forum is aimed at helping and promoting the development of innovative technologies for the French Digital TV environment. Among various topics, HD Forum has worked during the last 2 years on the TNT2.0 project.

The goal was to coordinate the launch of HbbTV interactive services in France. This effort is done in partnership with the HbbTV consortium and led to an upgrade version of HbbTV standard, version 1.5 and a first recommendation for DRM's.

In this respect:

• The HD Forum board is making official the TNT 2.0 specifications to be applied on the French market;


• All together, manufacturers, broadcasters and distributors representatives committed around the technical choices made so far, expecting that products and services will ramp up from Q4’2012 to April 2013 and beyond. Of course, products and service launch plans details remain the respective choices of broadcasters, manufacturers and distributors;


• In order to support this goal, the “TNT 2 0 - Terminal Specification - V1.1 Final” including last improvement has been made available on the HD FORUM web site for a wider distribution to all interested parties, including non HD FORUM members;


• The HD FORUM is also pleased to announce the full release of the TNT 2.0 test suite, developed in cooperation with companies Farncombe and Digital TV labs in the UK. This test suite has already been licensed to multiple manufacturers, and the HD FORUM restates the requirement for consumer electronic manufacturers to self-validate compliance of their products, by passing the TNT 2.0 test suite. The test suite is licensed under a fair and non-discriminatory terms and conditions approved by the HD FORUM;


• In parallel, work continues on the interoperability of services;


• In due course, HD FORUM will contribute to prepare the launch of products and services complying with the TNT 2.0 specifications.

Source: HD FORUM

HbbTV on Brink of Global Expansion

HbbTV is now odds on to emerge from the cluster of interactive and hybrid TV standards to become the dominant platform uniting broadcast and connected TV.

Currently sweeping through continental Europe, and under trial in a number of other major countries including China, Japan and the U.S., it looks like the winning hybrid TV platform is emerging, partly through not being too ambitious and sticking clearly within defined boundaries. It leaves plenty of scope for apps vendors, broadcasters and pay TV operators to innovate around the platform and stamp their own distinctive flavor on their products or standards.

The closest to an actual HbbTV deployment outside Europe is in South Korea, where national broadcaster KBS is launching services based on the country’s OHTV (Open Hybrid Television), which is a separate development but almost identical technically and now likely to be aligned completely with HbbTV given its momentum in other countries. In Korea, the service is hybrid digital terrestrial and broadband, as is the case with many early HbbTV deployments in Europe.

HbbTV evolved in 2009 as a joint project between France and Germany, and it is those two countries along with Spain and the Netherlands that have made the early running with HbbTV deployments. In Germany, at least eight broadcasters, including public service broadcaster RTL and pan European media distributor ZDF, are now offering HbbTV apps over terrestrial or satellite networks.

Such apps can combine multiple delivery channels into one coherent service, or provide additional viewing options within a single channel. An example of the first of these use cases is German home shopping channel QVC, which is exploiting HbbTV to unite its various existing distribution channels including TV, Internet and mobile networks, within one coherent service allowing customers to search for products. An example of the second is German private broadcaster Vox, part of the RTL Group, which is using HbbTV for a cooking channel, allowing viewers to access different recipes for demonstration within a show by pressing the “red button.”

In France, public broadcaster France Télévisions has been leading the way and is using HbbTV to expand coverage of the French Open tennis tournament over the next two weeks. It will allow viewers to choose from a number of matches at a given time, again using red button functionality.

Spain, meanwhile, has agreed to adopt HbbTV as its system for connected TV, with pilots completed by broadcaster Mediaset España and Telco Telefonica. These involved Mediaset’s Telecinco importing content from Telefónica’s services, including Movistar Imagenio, Movistar Videoclub and Terra TV.

Similarly, Dutch broadcasters, including SBS, NPO and RTL, have agreed to use HbbTV as their standard for hybrid connectivity, while launches have just occurred or are imminent in Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland.

HbbTV has also won over the Nordic region, which originally was planning to build hybrid broadcast around the alternative Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) developed by the DVB, with the main original difference being that HbbTV is based on HTML while MHP is written in Java language. Germany originally went with MHP, but it failed miserably, partly because there was then little demand for interactive TV in the country.

Now, the Nordic region comprising Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, oddly also including Ireland, has replaced DVB-MHP with HbbTV as the common API for hybrid digital receivers within its NorDig digital TV specification. The stated reason is that HbbTV now has much wide market acceptance, with a range of TV applications and new hybrid services, and crucially HbbTV compatible receivers from a number of manufacturers such as Humax of South Korea. Also significant is that HbbTV software stacks are now incorporated in leading hybrid chip sets from Broadcom and Sigma Designs. Most major players in the connected TV arena are now members of the HbbTV Forum.

The success of HbbTV can be put down to three factors: its flexibility; foundation on existing standards that are being implemented anyway as part of OTT and IPTV deployments; and support from industry groups, notably the European Broadcast Union (EBU), whose influence extends outside the continent.

The EBU is hoping that the Olympics will give HbbTV a big lift, and has laid the ground by offering “white-label” HbbTV applications free of charge to its members. These apps are currently being customized and rebranded for deployment just ahead of the games, when they will deliver interactive services to peak audiences during the Olympics.

Equally crucial is the approval of the Open IPTV Forum (OIPF), which has emerged as the major body forging standards for OTT and general online video service delivery over unmanaged infrastructures, as well as IPTV within closed ‘walled garden’ networks.

The key component for OTT that has been adopted by HbbTV is the OIPF’s Open Internet Profile, based on its Declarative Application Environment (DAE), which is a browser for TVs with support for various presentation mechanisms including HTML4, HTML5, SVG, and CE-HTML.

“Its key component is the set of JavaScript objects which permit the manipulation of media for both content on demand as well as live streaming, interactions with local and remote storage, and control of adaptive streaming,” said Nilo Mitra, OIPF president. “This specification is reused by the HbbTV Consortium for providing catch-up services via broadcaster portals, and is now implemented in retail TVs sold by major manufacturers in several EU regions,” Mitra added, arguing that this was the only fully open specification for content delivery over unmanaged networks available today.

The OIPF specification includes a mechanism for adaptive delivery of MPEG-2 transport streams over HTTP, and this has been incorporated into one of the profiles of the newly just published ISO DASH specifications, according to Mitra. DASH is likely to become the standard mechanism for adaptive streaming, taking over from existing proprietary systems such as Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and possibly Apple’s HLS (HTTP Live Streaming).

Support for DASH streaming was an addition to HbbTV. But, at the outset, it had the right foundation by being built on two relevant and mature technology sets, one being web standards already included in web browsers for embedded devices, and the second being the Digital Storage Media Command and Control (DSM CC) specification already part of the MHEG-5 interactive platform adopted in several countries, including the UK and Australia.

Use of existing web standards provided the basis for broadband access, while DSM CC specified a common approach for interactive services uniting two way online delivery with one way broadcast. DSM CC, therefore, delivered the hybrid component, and although it is a complex set of technologies the basic principle is simple. The aim is to facilitate control over transport of audio and video streams within interactive services in both a bi-directional environment such as a cable TV or VOD system, and also a uni-directional service such as satellite or digital terrestrial.

The challenge was how to simulate interactivity in a one-way environment when there was no return path. The simple answer was to adopt a carousel approach — hence the name. As the receiver in a traditional broadcast environment has no return path and so cannot request specific files from a server, DSM CC periodically transmits every file, and the receiver then grabs the ones it wants as they pass by on the carousel. Of course, this is not particularly efficient since if a receiver misses a file it has to wait for it come round again. But, techniques have been developed and embodied in HbbTV to improve the interactive performance for one way broadcast services.

It will become clear during the rest of 2012 how well HbbTV does perform in a variety of hybrid environments including those involving one-way broadcast, with the Olympics providing useful feedback. But, HbbTV has still not convinced all its doubters, even in Europe. Italy is the notable outsider, having gone its own way by deploying MHP for hybrid services.

The UK is the other major odd one out, since its much delayed connected TV platform, YouView, took a different approach. However, the UK is itself a bit of a hybrid, since the Digital Technology Group (DTG) responsible for digital TV and particularly terrestrial standards in the UK developed an extension to MHEG-5 called the MHEG-5 Interaction Channel (MHEG-IC), allowing broadcast interactive services to be delivered via an IP connection. This made it more like HbbTV, and, subsequently, the DTG has fully endorsed HbbTV for Freeview DTT.

By Philip Hunter, Broadcast Engineering

Everyone Following their Own Path with HBB

Do not expect rationalisation of standards and anything close to a pan-European, let alone a global specification for hybrid broadcast broadband (HBB). That was the message from a panel of experts at the OTT TV World Summit on Wednesday.

Anthony Smith-Chaigneau, Chairman of the DVB-GEM Commercial Module, which determines what the DVB interactive TV standard needs to deliver for the market, suggested the problem is not a technical one but a human one.

“There are plenty of standards but nobody is choosing them,” he said. “Everyone is fighting each other and following their own path.”

Dr Klaus Illgner-Fehns, IRT Director and Chair at the HbbTV Consortium, disagreed with the analysis that the problem is down to people and organisations getting in the way of progress towards harmonisation. He explains the lack of conformity by the fact that different markets have different needs.

Illgner-Fehns highlighted the progress of HbbTV, which looks to have the best chance of pan-regional adoption. This ETSI standard has strong support in Germany and France and he says there is even interest in Japan, China and the U.S. He attributes the success of HbbTV to meeting the need for a solution that accommodated Internet services and applications but was also available quickly and was not over-engineered. Importantly, the standard also left room for device manufacturers to provide some differentiation. Now the standard can provide economies of scale for smaller CE vendors looking to promote their own branded portals via hybrid solutions.

Richard Lindsay-Davies, Director General at the Digital TV Group, the body responsible for developing and maintaining the DTT specifications in the UK, also noted the lack of uniformity and pointed out that even HbbTV, which could potentially deliver a one-size-fits-all standard, is being implemented using different profiles in different countries.

“It seems that everyone wants a standard as long as it is their standard.”

And this is just the hybrid broadcast broadband market. In connected TV there are multiple manufacturer platforms and as pointed out on another panel at the conference, even TV models from the same vendor in different years are not fully compatible. There is also an interesting dynamic between the connected TV market, characterized by CE vendor content portals that stand separate to linear TV, and the HBB market, notable for the way linear TV content links seamlessly via ‘Red button’ type links to interactive and catch-up TV services.

Antonio Gioia, Project Manager at DTT Content Factory for Mediaset in Italy, said the CE vendors are trying to push the broadcaster towards their own ‘widgets platforms’ to host their content and services – something that on the face of it is attractive because these platforms are already built and deployed. But the company is not convinced, with Gioia saying,

“All that glistens is not gold. We try to keep our content integrity and avoid the division of our brand, which is why we are trying to push the idea of a common [broadcast-centric] platform like in the UK, Spain, France and Germany.”

DVB-GEM is being used as the basis for HBB services in Italy.

By John Moulding, Videonet

YouView Has Global Ambitions for its HBB Spec

With the YouView (formerly Canvas) and HbbTV initiatives gaining momentum for the delivery of Hybrid Broadcast Broadband (HBB) services in Europe, there is a growing interest in whether there is enough common ground in the standards and technologies that underpin them to deliver some technology harmonisation. One of the biggest prizes could be the ability for content owners to develop services for HbbTV that can also be enjoyed via YouView-compliant devices. However Jeff Hunter, Chief Architect at YouView, believes that the more ambitious scope of the YouView project means it would be difficult for some services developed for this platform to run on the current, first generation of HbbTV devices.

Hunter is keen to emphasise that discussions about YouView and HbbTV harmonisation should distinguish between the technologies used to deliver services and the wider commercial requirements that drive them. The bottom line is that they are designed for different things. He notes that the initial push for the HbbTV initiative was to deliver strong interactive services for the digital TV market in markets like France and Germany, including a teletext replacement, and making services available quickly in particular on the current generation of iDTVs (integrated digital TVs).

YouView, on the other hand, is initially designed for the UK market where ‘Red Button’ interactive services are well established and widely used, and is looking to ‘move the needle’ in terms of services and features for a market used to interactive TV.

“Different territories are in different states of market development and that is part of the reason why we are seeing different business drivers,” Hunter says. “YouView shareholders already offer successful connected television services like BT Vision [the Freeview/IPTV platform from the UK telco] and online services like BBC iPlayer and 4oD [Channel 4’s online on-demand offer] and it is about evolving those businesses into another phase of the consumer offering. That requires a more capable platform.”

Hunter also points out that YouView is creating a complete ecosystem of content, services and device partners, plus a retail brand, so these different commercial requirements must be stripped out of the harmonisation debate. He says both the business outcomes sought by the HbbTV initiative and YouView could be perfectly viable.

“If you are harmonising technology, the starting point is to agree what the commercial requirements are. That is where the challenge has been in terms of full harmonisation [for HBB] not just at a European level but globally,” he observes.

However, when it comes to finding the overlaps in enabling technology between YouView and HbbTV, Hunter says there is already common ground and potential for more. There have been discussions about how the choices made for the different specifications could map into each other.

“Of course we want harmonisation,” he says, referring to the narrower technical definition. “There are benefits to all parties for using common enabling technology and that is through the economies of scale it delivers, leading to price erosion of consumer equipment and headend services.”

If it became possible to deliver HbbTV services on YouView specification devices it would boost the chances of YouView becoming a pan-European solution for Hybrid Broadcast Broadband. European broadcasters would be able to maintain their HbbTV services but deliver enhanced interactive services as well to consumers equipped with higher specification connected devices. Whether that happens or not, it is clear YouView has ambitions for its specification to be used internationally anyway, with the aim of creating economies of scale for device and content partners.

According to Hunter: “While the UK market is large, the device partners who are investing in YouView products really want to take that investment and use it on a global scale. If our content partners can package content for YouView and then make that available outside the UK that would deliver a fantastic cost saving for them so that is an important consideration for our shareholders as well [who include producers and exporters of content like the BBC and ITV]. It is important for our partners to have a technology solution that can be deployed into a base that is larger than the UK and the target for them is global. We are already working on making the YouView story into a broader story.”

Hunter adds that a large number of companies are looking at what YouView is doing in the UK and are extremely interested in the approach. “It is seen as a very forward-looking and visionary initiative,” he observes. He adds that YouView as a service does not have any exclusivity over the content created for use on the platform. So if someone produces content in a YouView friendly format there is nothing to stop them distributing it to any device based on the same technology.

This makes the publication of the YouView specifications all the more significant. These are now available on the company’s website and have been submitted to the DTG (Digital TV Group) in the UK, the organisation responsible for maintaining the ‘D-Book’ technical bible for the UK DTT platform and which will also provide test and conformance for Connected TV services. YouView became a member of the DTG last week. Over the coming months these specifications will also be translated into documents aimed at specific stakeholders like ISPs, content providers and advertisers to explain how they can work with the platform.

YouView already makes use of many existing and emerging standards from the DVB, W3C and OIPF (Open IPTV Forum), among others. “Where there are good specifications already in the standards domain we are looking to use those,” Hunter adds.

By John Moulding, Videonet