The first commercial deployments of version 2.0 of the hybrid broadcast/broadband standard HbbTV are now likely to surface in the second half of 2015, with mainstream adoption taking place the year after, according to the HbbTV Association – currently holding its annual Symposium in Paris.
Proposed features for HbbTV 2.0 include improved support for HTML-5, push-VOD, ad insertion, HEVC video and MPEG-Dash – plus the introduction of companion screen app-launching and synchronisation.
It had been hoped the specification would be nailed down around half-way through 2014, but Kirk Edwardson, co-chair of the HbbTV Marketing Group, said that 2.0 was still moving through ratification and final approval.
“Late this year/Q1 next year, we should be into final ratification, and starting then to turn that over to commercial suppliers […] to start to implement,” he said. “So I think we should start seeing our first 2.0 services and devices in the second half of 2015. 2016 is probably where you’ll see it really blossom.”
MPEG-DASH is slowly but surely becoming the main competitor to HLS, driven by adoption by major players and intrinsic strengths. Here's who's using it now, who's going to be soon, and what challenges still need to be addressed.
Last year at the European Broadasting Union’s BroadThinking conference, the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) conducted a survey of 13 major European broadcasters on MPEG-DASH adoption. At the time, about three-quarters of them projected to have DASH deployed by end of first half of 2014. Primary sources of concern for the broadcasters were the availability of DASH enabled clients and packaging tools. One year later, we haven’t seen many broadcasters deploying DASH in production, but the traction seems to have shifted to over-the-top (OTT) content distributors and operators.
So, who are the actors already in production or close to production with DASH? What are the remaining roadblocks for its adoption? How will DASH be positioned against existing Adaptive Bitrate technologies in the coming months? What is the exact status of the DASH standard and its most promising evolutions? What are the upcoming initiatives aiming at fostering DASH adoption? Let’s get a handle on where DASH is today, and where it’s headed.
Une présentation OVFSquad de Nicolas Weil le 17/10/13.
Les thèmes abordés : - panorama du support par l'industrie - facteurs d'adoption et freins - analyse du processus de standardisation - avancées en Common Encryption + Multi-DRM - point sur les players et HbbTV 1.5 - topo sur les prochains gros dossiers : HEVC, Multichannel audio et QoS - point sur les déploiements actuels et annoncés
There is a new initiative to make it easier, cheaper and faster to build hybrid DVB/IP receivers and initially it is aimed at the Tier 2 and Tier 3 Consumer Electronics market, although the company behind the new open source stack-kit believes that T1 connected TV device makers and even platform operators may eventually see value in their work. The new UTK stack-kit was officially unveiled at IBC in September and is driven by Pixsan Digital Software, which describes itself as the master gatekeeper for the stack.
Like RDK, UTK exploits gstreamer (which will be available in a number of next-generation chipsets, according to Williams) and Qt frameworks (which has 450 developers working on it) to create what Pixsan claims is a compelling hybrid TV architecture. As well as being the ‘master gatekeeper’ Pixsan Digital is a lead developer and will assist other UTK licensees with modules for building into devices.
Seven Network is working on plans to deliver an ad-free subscription TV service via the Internet using HbbTV according to recent press in Australia.
And it's not just the Seven Network, Australia's Freeview has officially selected HbbTV and it's already written in its technical specifications - which is a major win for HbbTV and it's aspirations to go global.
Freeview is the free digital television service in Australia. It comprises all the channels from Australia's free-to-view broadcasters, including the ABC, SBS, Seven Network, Nine Network, Network ten, PRIME7, WIN and Southern Cross.
Nicolas Weil's insight:
Interesting expansion of a standard that we could have thought to be pan-european only...
By the end of the year, Japanese audiences will be able to interact with some of their favorite TV programs in ways never before possible.Japan Broadcasting Corp., the country’s public broadcaster (better known as NHK), is putting the finishing touches on a technology dubbed Hybridcast. The system will enable Internet-based content to be tightly integrated with broadcast digital television, similar to what is promised for the Advanced Television Systems Committee 2.0 technology in the United State
The new HbbTV-Requirements Group is dedicated to specifying requirements for version 2.0 of the standard. IRT contributed a document with feature proposals for HbbTV 2.0, including several features from the HBB-NEXT project by IRT and TNO: identity management, second screen / multi-screen and several aspects of media synchronisation. Based on these contributions, IRT and TNO received mandates to work out more detailed feature descriptions in HbbTV feature templates. These will be used to discuss and decide which features will be supported by HbbTV 2.0.
Following the example of Germany, France, Holland and Austria, among other countries, Spain has agreed to adopt HbbTV as the standard for connected TV. The Ministry of Industry has approved a formal text backed by the electronics industry and TV broadcasters including 54 companies to adopt the HbbTV standard to develop new connected TV services.
With the decision, the Administration paves the way for the introduction of HbbTV. From now on, all TV sets with Internet connection capabilities will include the standard and a label to identify them. The Electronic Manufacturers Association Ametic estimates that this year the sale of HbbTV-ready TV sets will double to 1.1 million – one in four TV sets sold.
TDF Media Services has announced the launch of the first end-to-end HbbTV platform. This new platform for broadcasters and media companies is able to support any kind of video-based hybrid TV services. Thanks to the HbbTV technologies, it is now possible to enrich a live broadcast stream with additional internet content delivered directly through the TV set.
The platform is compatible with HbbTV1.1 and HbbTV1.5 and supports both Marlin and Microsoft Playready DRMs. It also provides a full end-to-end solution, including metadata management, video processing, content monetisation. Content Delivery Network provided by SmartJog enables a smooth and very high quality video streaming to all connected devices including HbbTV connected TV sets.
Other advanced features have been integrated to enrich the end-user experience, such as a recommendation engine provided by French technology company Cognik, an artificial intelligence engine which selects and proposes relevant content to a specific user.
Deployed Jointly by Abertis Telecom and Nagra, the Live and VOD Multiscreen Cloud Service Leverages Harmonic ProMedia Suite and Nagra MediaLive Multiscreen.
Harmonic, the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, today announced that it has teamed up with Nagra, the digital TV division of the Kudelski Group and world's leading independent provider of content protection and multiscreen television solutions, to power an innovative cloud-based OTT video service for broadcasters and pay-TV service providers offered jointly by major Spanish infrastructure telecom operator Abertis Telecom and Nagra. The multiscreen hosting service is already in use by Spanish broadcasters for their HbbTV based services and will be enhanced to become what is expected to be the world's first commercial deployment of MPEG-DASH, a standards-based adaptive streaming protocol that supports multiple DRM systems via common encryption, as well as the first deployment of HbbTV 1.5.
Freesat has developed Free time using widely adopted European open standards, including HTML5, OIPF and HbbTV, which Strickland said would make it easy for third parties to launch on the platform. “HTML5 gives us an edge. It’s a low barrier to entry for broadcast and broadband partners, and offers a gateway to people developing those kinds of services.”
The service enables Blue Bridge receiver to extract HbbTV data from the DVB stream and transfer them to a Tablet with the Blue Bridge wireless communication (a simple Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection for example). Viewers can browse on HbbTV interactive application on a Tablet with a standard legacy TV set (non HbbTV compatible and non-connected TV). TV channels can address the 110 Million legacies CI Plus TVs even if they are not compatible with HbbTV. Viewers can watch a sporting event with nothing overlaid on TV screen but having individual access to associated information on their tablet.
This year the EBU BroadThinking Conference was sounding like a holistic swirl, a milestone in the trend of technology to define sets that are greater than the sum of their parts, through creative evolution. « Where Broadcast Meets BroadBand », you get some interesting fusion effect occurring and diluting the traditional boundaries of the screens, with the handheld devices being part of the big screen experience or extending it rather than trying to scalp it, in an environment where all the devices converge towards a restricted set of standards rather than tracing their own line.
While we by default think that standardization kills creativity, events like BroadThinking show that it’s the opposite: if we gather energies to solve common problems together, we can both come up with a more evolved solution and concentrate on what’s important past the pixel grid: the user experience, so consistent across screens that you forget there’s more than one screen involved.
A l’occasion du CES 2014, qui s’est tenu début janvier à Las Vegas, la firme allemande Novabase Digital TV Technologies a présenté une clé HDMI de classe opérateur qui fait office de décodeur IPTVune fois insérée dans la prise HDMI d’un écran plat. Une clé-décodeur qui a aussi l’originalité d’être la première de ce type à être compatible avec le standard de télévision connectée HbbTV.
Pour ce faire, le produit embarque le processeur SoC multimédia à cœur Mips SMP8674 deSigma Designs et le logiciel httvLink de l’éditeur français httv. Egalement compatible HTML5, httvLink est un middleware pour décodeurs et récepteurs TV connectés qui améliore la qualité de service en intégrant le support du standard MPEG-Dash et son mécanisme d’ajustement dynamique des flux multimédias aux fluctuations du réseau IP large bande.
With free-to-air broadcasters increasingly looking to hybrid solutions, combining broadcast with IP-based advanced interactive services to stay relevant, Europe’s HbbTV standard is evolving to enable a wider range of applications. Stuart Thomson reports.
Neotion has launched what it calls an HBB (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband) tablet solution to expand the enjoyment of HbbTV-compatible TV services. This solution means consumers using HbbTV compatible TVs and set-top boxes can use the tablet as a companion device for TV programming and HbbTV interactive services on the main screen, but it also enables people without HbbTV compatible televisions or STBs to enjoy the interactive HbbTV services on the tablet, including in synchronization with the TV live programme.
The Neotion Blue Bridge platform makes this possible. This provides secure wireless communication (e.g. Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) between television sets and companion devices, which enables synchronization of the screens if required for applications like real-time voting. Blue Bridge also supports an innovative digital couponing model where coupons (like for product promotions) can be delivered within the digital TV signal, then transferred to the companion and subsequently redeemed at shops, which has obvious potential for advertisers.
In the case of the Hbb Tablet, the Blue Bridge application extracts HbbTV data from the DVB stream and transfers this to the second screen. One of the target markets is legacy CI Plus televisions that are not compatible with HbbTV.
Nicolas Weil's insight:
Interesting technology idea of extracting the Hbb data from the DVB streams to play it on the tablet - I'd like to see the solution work without CAM module, in pure cloud configuration, though, as the CAM requirement is quite a restrictive requirement.
The FP7 HBB-Next project (http://hbb-next.eu) presents a proof-of-concept of mutli-source multimedia synchronisation. The demo shows content from four sources.
Digital TV Labs, which provides independent, specialised receiver conformance products and services, has today announced that it is the first HbbTV test centre officially registered by the HbbTV Consortium. The Consortium announced the release of the official HbbTV 1.1.1 Test Suite in August this year, key to HbbTV certification.
Digital TV Labs is the first lab officially licensed to certify compliance with the HbbTV 1.1.1 test suite for the large number of HbbTV-enabled iDTVs and set-top boxes being launched to support the fast-growing HbbTV services. Digital TV Labs can provide test reports in hours rather than days using the highly automated Ligada iSuite test harness.
Additionally using the company’s HbbTV 1.5 test suite incorporating DASH support, compliance testing can be provided for the HbbTV requirements of UK D-Book 7B, and for the French TNT2.0 HbbTV platform. Digital TV Labs has been very closely involved with the development of the official HbbTV Test Suite against the v1.1.1 specification from within the HbbTV Consortium and has authored nearly 50 per cent of its tests.
Vizion'R offers an MPEG2 TS Stream analysis tool which provides unique capabilities for analysis and presentation to inspect in detail the stream at all levels (audio, video, HbbTV, MPEG4-BIFS).
Features :
- Automatic reporting functionality (error and quality) - Compatible with Apple HTTP Streaming
The French TNT 2.0 connected television specifications now include MPEG DASH support, but is it a mandate or an update?
One of the more interesting bits of news coming out of last week's IBC tradeshow in Amsterdam was that the French government has mandated the use of MPEG DASH in all connected televisions.
The full story is a little more complicated, due to the number of connected TV initiatives floating around Europe. France's connected television scheme, backed by industry and government groups, is called TNT. It currently stands at version 2.0, which was launched mid-2011. The recent move to add DASH support to TNT 2.0 is the source of the buzz.
TNT is a French-only subset of what is commonly called Hybrid Broadcast Broadband television, or HbbTV, a pan-European standard for interactive televisions that now stands at version 1.5.
SyncTV, the leader in delivering television services to the largest set of Internet-connected TVs, mobile devices, and other media-enabled devices, today announced it will showcase a Hybrid Broadcasting TV (HbbTV) 1.5 solution demonstration, in conjunction with Harmonic, at International Broadcasting Convention 2012. SyncTV will showcase a live MPEG-DASH demo and multi-screen solution along with TF1 and MStar at IBC 2012 at the Harmonic booth (1.B20).
The solution uses Marlin DRM with MPEG-DASH adaptive streaming, and feeds off an industry-leading encoder, developed by Harmonic. By combining HbbTV and Marlin DRM, the standards-based over-the-top (OTT) TV solution offers a flexible platform for streaming broadcast content across multiple screens.
Anevia, a leader in video streaming solutions and service infrastructure for live TV and video on demand (VOD), announced today, that its ViaMotion multiscreen over-the-top (OTT) video streaming solution supports the Opera Devices SDK enabling HbbTV services through the Opera browser.
The Opera browser includes support for HbbTV 1.5, including MPEG-DASH OTT streams, for common use cases. By integrating the Opera browser into their products, manufacturers of connected TVs and set-top boxes are able to support ViaMotion’s enriched HbbTV features including catch-up TV, pauseTV, and startover TV.
SmarDTV and NAGRA, both Kudelski Group companies and Samsung Electronics today announced that they have successfully combined CI Plus and HbbTV with DRM to enable video-on-demand for over-the-top (OTT) networks directly to iDTVs without the use of a set-top box.
The system integrates the popular NAGRA Gravity User Interface running in HbbTV on Samsung 2012 TV models allowing NAGRA PRM protected content be streamed over IP to the TV using adaptive bitrate streaming and then descrambled by the CI Plus SmarCAM module from SmarDTV. The solution is fully compliant with CI Plus v1.3 and uses open standard interfaces including the Open IPTV forum (OIPF) DRM interface.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
![Digital TV Labs is first official HbbTV test centre [PR] | Video Breakthroughs | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/SaIHvlMZP6GNWx8GvUfZxjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
![Anevia streams MPEG-DASH video to Opera Devices SDK for HbbTV [PR] | Video Breakthroughs | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/gqM6zyCpju-pBP3IQ-yT1Dl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9){kind=small}
