A new protocol is set to change the way in which people consume and interact with their TVs. Paul Skelton reports.

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) is an industry standard, providing an open technology platform that seamlessly combines TV services delivered via broadcast with services delivered via broadband, enabling access to internet-only services for consumers using connected TVs and set-top boxes.

Now, with widespread support from free-to-air broadcasters, HbbTV is set to fundamentally change the way people watch their favourite stories.

“HbbTV is an enabling progression for us and for the industry,” Nine Network Australia CTO Mat Yelavich says.

“As a broadcaster, it allows us to ‘close the loop’ for the first time; providing the potential to truly personalise while also empowering the viewer with a very simple user experience.”

In the past, interactive television standards have had to rely on slow dial-up connections or expensive broadcast bandwidth to deliver applications and content. Standards like HbbTV take advantage of broad adoption of HDTVs and the wide-scale availability of broadband internet connections to provide an improved user experience. Applications are broadcast with standard linear TV by broadcasters to internet-connected televisions. Applications then access additional applications, data and non-linear video content from the Internet via the IP connection.

To coincide with the launch of HbbTV, Brightcove, a global provider of cloud services for video, has launched support for the standard, enabling broadcasters to combine over-the-air broadcast and IP delivery to publish personalised video and interactive TV experiences to users on connected TVs and set-top boxes.

Specifically, Brightcove is rolling out support in its Video Cloud online video platform for common encryption (CENC) packaging, Microsoft PlayReady and Marlin digital rights management (DRM) license serving, and multi-bitrate MPEG-DASH encoding.

“We’re a US cloud-based technology company that focuses on video as a technology and industry,” Brightcove A/NZ vice president Mark Blair says.

“We look at the world with two market perspectives – one is digital marketing for organisations and how that translates to the real world. We help brands of all shapes and sizes use video online to help sell their products and services, for example all video on the Tourism Australia website is powered by Brightcove.

“Our other big focus, which is increasingly becoming the core focus of Brightcove, is to work with premium media organisations, such as free-to-air broadcasters. These organisations are undergoing seismic shifts as the consumers of their content look to consume content on different devices anytime, anywhere, without any real viewing pattern.”

In support of HbbTV in Video Cloud, Brightcove is now offering support for MPEG-DASH, an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the internet delivered from conventional HTTP Web servers. Brightcove is also offering DRM packaging through CENC and license serving for Microsoft PlayReady and Marlin.

“HbbTV enables service providers to enhance the standard linear broadcast TV experience through personalisation, enabling any broadcaster, including free-to-air providers to deliver rich, interactive experiences to their customers,” Brightcove Media Group SVP and GM Anil Jain says.

“The Brightcove Video Cloud HbbTV solution enables the next generation of interactive TV by providing full support for the video workflow for HbbTV, making it easy for broadcasters to extend existing online video workflows to TVs and set-top boxes.”

According to Mark, “One of the things that is really interesting about the HbbTV Standard is that it has greater potential for usage and adoption than other TV-based IP platforms, and that it provides the first platform to allow a seamless transition between broadcast and IP on a large screen device.”

To work, integrators will need to ensure their clients own HbbTV-enabled TV sets that are connected to the internet.

“We’ve been working with a broad variety of CE device manufacturers to ensure they are capable of sending appropriate content over HbbTV. A lot of manufacturers already have HbbTV devices available in other markets, it’s just a matter of making them available here,” Mark says.

No date has yet been announced for the first Australian HbbTV broadcast.