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Satnews Daily
April 18th, 2011

Ocean Blue... HbbTV Interests (SatBroadcasting™)


[SatNews]The market interest in HbbTV continues to grow, with interest spreading throughout Europe.

The standard is driven by content providers and manufacturers who want to try and generate one common solution, delivering rich entertainment content to consumers via their TV or set-top box (STB). Germany is leading the way with many of the satellite operators generating “live” applications. In the UK, the DTG and other organizations, such as Freesat and YouView, are working to ensure that MHEG will coexist with other presentation engines — this opens up the possibility of having HbbTV applications in the UK alongside the existing MHEG services. In turn, MHEG-5 is being adapted so that DVB signalling for applications can operate along side HbbTV. The rate of development and interest in the standard has not come without its issues. As many applications and boxes struggle to maintain compatibility, the lack of conformance and testing for both products and applications is causing concern. Fortunately, the HbbTV certification group (of which Ocean Blue is a member) is close to defining a test framework and the mechanism in which product can obtain the logo. At the moment, self conformance via an open source test kit seems to be the most likely outcome. While the product certification issues are progressing and will catch up, there is still a great concern that there seems to be little effort to ensure application authors are generating content that will function on all receivers. For this reason, HbbTV may still be at a cross roads, as previous history has shown, if the content providers cannot feel confident that their applications will run on all products, they may loose faith and associated advertisement revenue. Ocean Blue software maintains its HbbTV browser agnostic approach to the market and offers various solutions. Ocean Blue can provide complete turnkey solutions for DVB-C, DVB-S2 and DVB-T/T2. The Company's Voyager MHEG-5 and the associated DSM-CC / AIT handler can be provided as modules to work alongside a third party Hbbtv browser.