Interview with chairman at HbbTV - Senior Advisor & Board Member in TMT & Digital - Strategic Alliances - Corporate Development - M&A - Industrial Affairs for Cable!Vision Europe.
Mr Grivet, the HbbTV Symposium and Awards 2024 is just around the corner. What are the main topics we can expect this year and why are these topics particularly relevant for the industry?
No doubt, the Freely service with its innovative usage of HbbTV OpApp specification and its transformative ambition for the UK TV landscape will be a major topic, and I would guess THE main topic.
Next to that, one more time , Targeted Advertising will be a key topic, but may be in a different style compared to previous years ; in the past, the talks were very much on the hopes and ideas around targeted advertising, or about the early deployments; but now TA becomes a reality and the focus is shifting on even more practical aspects ; who has compliant devices ? how many ? how do you find them ? how do you test and certify them ? how do you adapt your broadcast chain to introduce TA?
By the way, more generally, the practical aspects of testing, deploying, scaling HbbTV services and activities at large is a key theme; the market now knows HbbTV, likes it for the functional possibilities it offers, and is keen to streamline deployment.
The conference will focus on the latest developments in HbbTV specifications. Which innovations and applications, such as Voice Control or Targeted Advertising, will be in the spotlight?
Our latest core specification is the 2.0.4 core spec version which introduces many accessibility improvements , and in deed also voice control; but it also has other very important aspects like a better DVB-I integration and , this is especially interesting at a moment where we see the market really active in introducing DVB-I ; DVB-I and HbbTV create a very powerful combination.
The TV industry is changing rapidly, especially in the areas of streaming and AVOD. What role does HbbTV play in the growing market for FAST Channels and personalised TV experiences?
The very nature and history, you could even say “mission in life” of HbbTV is to enable streaming, on-demand, personalized experiences for end-users starting from Broadcast linear TV channels, and HbbTV does that very well; the perfect examples are the “ red-button” services, where for instance one can re-start a program from the beginning , or the targeted advertising enabled by HbbTV-TA. Technically speaking, HbbTV is also a perfect tool for FAST channels, but I am not sure that the market players who operate FAST channel have yet understood it, but that may come !
HbbTV and DVB-I are often referred to as complementary technologies. How do these two technologies work together and what synergies do you expect to see in the coming years?
In deed, DVB-I and HbbTV are very complementary and together capture and respond to a lot of the deep changes in the way TV is delivered and consumed.
DVB-I enables to “announce” and promote a bouquet of linear TV channels which are delivered in IP, replicating and extending the traditional and popular experience of broadcast networks; DVB-I needs HbbTV to achieve certain features like access control and obtaining the GDPR consent.
HbbTV remains the best way to create personalized and on-demand experiences to linear channels, and this applies to the channels delivered through DVB-I ( or announced to be more precise as DVB-I is not a transport protocol).
A good example of this is the new Eutelsat Sat.tv connect service, which combines DVB-I and HbbTV to create an enriched TV environment for satellite users and TV channels.
Addressable TV is becoming increasingly important. Can you give us an insight into how the HbbTV-TA specification has been received by the industry and what new use cases are emerging?
The market is hungry for addressable advertising for obvious reasons, and we now can see a series of commercial announcements which evidence that HbbTV-TA is really adopted and deployed at an accelerated pace ; we have heard for instance of the partnership announced between Samsung and Mediaset in Italy, of ATVI, the entity dedicated to TA certification created by RTL and P7, and I can observe the intense activity in the HbbTV Association around TA ; my feeling is that most 2025 TV models which will hit the market next year will be TA compatible, and already many 2024 and sometime earlier models are compatible. It took time, but we can now see and enjoy this as a market reality.
How do you see the future development of interactive TV applications? Will we see more innovative applications via HbbTV in the coming years?
If we speak in terms of technology and functionalities, I am not sure that the consumers and the market need so much more innovation from HbbTV ; the amount of innovation introduced in the last 5 or 8 years is enormous, and may be the fundamental customer needs can now be well covered by the available technology. What will probably be in focus is to keep improving the fluidity, the simplicity of consumer experiences. And behind the scene, a lot of innovation and work is happening to always improve the efficiency and the reliability of the deployment of the HbbTV services.
The market for TV sets and set-top boxes is constantly evolving. What role does the certification of devices play and how does the HbbTV Association ensure interoperability?
For HbbTV, as for any specification, the specifications is useless, even if it is excellent on paper, if it is not correctly implemented on devices, and if the market does not have an easy proof of compliance; this is what certification does. Some countries have a precise and well organized certification regime, some do not , and maybe we need a more streamlined and pan-European certification vision in the HbbTV ecosystem ; this is what ATVI for instance does for HbbTV-TA, with a real-life inspired application which is complementing what HbbTV does with its unit tests; this is new, but maybe we will see more of this in the future.
In terms of user-friendliness: How will HbbTV be able to offer TV viewers an even more intensive, personalised viewing experience in the coming years?
As a specification, HbbTV has a lot of what is needed to create great end-user services, and application developers and publishers already do a great job in making use of this potential. Looking forward, we may even further improve the viewing experience thanks to the tight integration between HbbTV and DVB-I, the new operator applications spec and also the planned reinforced integration of DRM in HbbTV core spec.
Finally, how do you see HbbTV evolving over the next five years and what challenges and opportunities do you see for the TV industry in terms of hybrid TV services?
The confrontation between traditional broadcasters and the new global OTT giants will continue, and they will, ironically, keep converging; SVOD iconic players introduces linear channels and advertising, and Broadcasters actively deploy streaming and On demand… so they converge while they compete.
An other key trend is the “OS-ization” of TV sets ; TV sets are not anymore the passive ( in the sense of “neutral”) , image and sound delivery devices we were used to, and they become active devices driven by a variety of Operating Systems which increasingly regulate what happens on the TV , similar to what occurs on mobile phones; HbbTV certainly has a role to play in this new landscape as it serves as a rather neutral and low-profile alternative entry door into TV sets to execute rich applications and services ; in a certain way, it already does what the market now strives to create for mobile phones to comply with the DMA.
Source: linkedin.com
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