Broadcasting the 2012 Olympic Games - CSI Magazine

HbbTV
The evolution of broadcast
Already reaching maturity in Germany, HbbTV is not only
set for rollout across Europe but also in other parts of the
world, says Adrian Pennington
Despite some criticism from
certain quarters, HbbTV
has been accepted by
Europe’s national
broadcasters as a de-facto
standard with interest
spreading to commercial
operators and to other parts of the globe on the
back of new DRM and adaptive streaming
capabilities.
With estimates of 60 million HbbTV compliant
TV sets in Western Europe by 2014, HbbTV
appears to have settled as a ‘must have’ industry
standard. Almost every European country has
endorsed and/or adopted the standard, and the
remaining countries are trialling HbbTV or have
near-term plans to deploy it.
First demonstrated in 2009, impetus to hybrid
TV was given by 20 members of the EBU last
December who agreed to a European-wide rollout
during 2012. These included TVR (Romania),
RTE (Ireland); RAI (Italy); RTVE (Spain); TRT
(Turkey); YLE (Finland); MTV Magyar Radio
(Hungary); ORF (Austria); RTBF (Belgium);
NRK (Norway) and TVP and TVN in Poland
(see table, on next page).
“HbbTV is a standard (as a technology
solution), which is favoured by broadcasters, as
they do not lose control over the content and
environment,” says Shirlene Chandrapal, VP of
connected TV at Smartclip. “We see HbbTV as
one part of the connected TV world, which can
be described as the broadcaster-driven
counterpart to the smart TV approaches by
CE-manufacturers.”
The most mature market is Germany, which
now has a wide range of HbbTV services and
receivers in support of programming at ARD,
ZDF and Bavaria’s Bayerische Rundfunk.
German sports channel Sport1 is to use Teveo’s
HbbTV platform for distribution of its signal to
areas where the channel is not carried by the local
or regional operator and Eutelsat’s German
subsidiary, KabelKiosk, has launched a hybrid
service for cable homes. Services available
through ‘KabelKiosk choice’ include VOD and
catch-up TV, while network operators can
customise pages with regional news, RSS feeds,
clips, or marketing campaigns.
France Télévisions is backing the HbbTV
variant TNT 2.0, GlobeCast and France 24 are
launching an exploratory HbbTV service with
Orange and SES; while TF1 will launch its digital
brand MyTF1 on HbbTV this autumn.
Danish national broadcaster DR is into a yearlong
pilot HbbTV-based TV anytime service
partnered with Nordija. The new service, Dr Nu,
“We see HbbTV as
one part of the
connected TV world,
which can be
described as the
broadcaster-driven
counterpart to the
smart TV approaches
by CE-manufacturers.”
is available via the dr.dk website and is based on
Nordija’s fokusOn middleware.
Dutch broadcasters (SBS, NPO and RTL) are
aligning in a choice of HbbTV as their standard
for hybrid connectivity. NPO is conducting
HbbTV trials on its Canal Digital satellite DTH
platform and Ziggo cable networks. These trials
will begin with Sony Bravia CTV sets with built-in
satellite tuners as well as HbbTV support,
although other leading CE manufacturers - Philips
and Samsung - plan to join the
burgeoning Dutch hybrid
market with HbbTV sets by
year end.
Spain’s public broadcaster
RTVE, Mediaset Spain and
telco Telefónica, have entered into a three-way
alliance to trial an HbbTV service, with Mediaset
España making video content available from its
internet TV portals and Telefónica adding its web
TV service, Terra TV, into the mix.
In Eastern Europe, Czech TV has teamed with
Slovak digital TV hardware producer ANTIK
Technology to test an HbbTV service with 40,000
subscribers, while Polish broadcaster TVN started
HbbTV tests in March 2012.
The UK situation is more complex but FTA
satellite service Freesat has revealed that the
second generation ‘G2’ spec for its receivers will
use HbbTV to take advantage of digital TV
chipsets being developed for that standard.
YouView, meanwhile, will launch with a
proprietary Flash-based implementation.
“Although MHEG-5 is now effectively a legacy
technology, the DTG-promoted CTV platform has
not announced deployment, no receiver
conformance regime and it seems inevitable that
this platform will morph into an HbbTV profile,”
says Keith Potter, CEO, Digital TV Labs, a
member of the HbbTV Steering Group as well as
vice chair of its Testing Group.
Major events this summer - the Olympics and
the UEFA European football championship - will
likely boost the purchase of HbbTV-ready TV sets.
The EBU is offering three white-label HbbTV
applications for the Olympics free of charge to
members, who can customise them to offer a
range of interactive services. Spain’s RTVE is one
participant in the scheme.
Aligning with other standards
It is interesting to observe the increase in the
number of operators - paid and free - reviewing
HbbTV as an evolution of their current platforms.
Growth is being partly driven by the desire to
standardise on the delivery of content and the
tools that can be used to manage them.
“A neutral platform allows these operators to
increase the range of set-top box vendors that can
supply them and allows them to bring much of
14 May-June 2012 www.csimagazine.com