Hybrid TV and HbbTV activities and solutions by Fraunhofer FOKUS

HybridTV, connected TV, SmartTV, all those synonyms are currently used to describe a new kind of TV devices providing capabilities to display internet services and web content. These applications and services are offered in parallel to traditional digital TV channels. Programs are enriched with additional content related to the TV channel. Most popular services are portal services, online video libraries, or sketch up TV databases and HD Teletext, which is the next expansion stage of the well known teletext. All those hybrid services have one thing common - they combine traditional TV offers with value added content coming from the internet. The content is web-based and rendered by a web browser with extensions for CE devices (CE-HTML and HTML5 with TV extensions).

Several standardization bodies are currently working on hybrid TV platforms. The most important are HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV), W3C with its Web and TV interest group, as well as the OIPF (Open IPTV Forum). Fraunhofer FOKUS supports actively all three standardization efforts with contributions and proof-of-concept implementations as well as interoperability testing.

These activities generates our deep knowlegde and independent view on all different technologies used abroad the specific platforms and implementations in this rapidly growing market segment.

We are building applications and services that conform to standards such as HbbTV and CE-HTML.

Current examples:

• HbbTV-based Broadcast TV measurement
  
• Dynamic Ad Substitution (DAS) allowing to replace broadcast spots and commercial TV breaks with targeted broadband ads
  
• HbbTV app development (VoD portal / Mediathek apps)
  
• Reference implementations and test cases for HbbTV standardization including HbbTV-TA

HbbTV Interoperability Workshops

As HbbTV member we have regularly participated at HbbTV Interoperability Workshops, which allows us to keep in contact and exchange experiences with hardware manufacturers and content providers. This increases our competence regarding the quickly evolving standard HbbTV by working with the latest hard and software.

DASH Industry Forum

The DASH Industry Forum is an international cooperation of companies who create recommendations, fill bugs and attend interop events in order to shape the future of MPEG DASH. We are an active contributor and support the development of “dash.js”, an open source projekt by DASH-IF, as we promote non-proprietary browser-based MPEG-DASH players.