Hybrid Broadcast Broadband Television (HbbTV) represents a consortium of industry companies engaged in digital broadcasting, Internet domain and standardization.
HbbTV is also an international standard (specification) defining a delivery of digital interactive TV to the users through a common user interface on TVs or set-top-boxes.
Digital TV can be delivered via broadcast technologies (DVB over cable, satellite or terrestrially) as well as broadband technologies allowing access to Internet.
HbbTV is not only about digital TV but brings users a lot of information and entertainment services to augment user experiences. HbbTV tries to combine the best of Television and the Internet.
The broadcast connection is mainly used to transmit standard TV, radio and data services (linear content), transport and signaling of broadcast-related applications and associated data and synchronization of TV/radio/data services and applications. The broadband connection is used to carry on demand related content (e.g. video on demand - VoD), transport of applications and associated data which are or not related to broadcasted content (e.g. teletext), serve as a duplex channel for an exchange of information between applications and application servers and to discover broadcast-independent applications. This concept is depicted in Fig. 1.
So far the HbbTV consortium defined three versions of HbbTV standard. First version (1.0) published in June 2010 specified basic aspects of HbbTV technology allowing users to watch digital media coming via broadcast connection as well as streamed via broadband access [3]. Users can download and record content to local storage (internal or USB drives). They also can access channel list and view EPG (electronic program guide) data. And above all they can use broadcast-related and broadcast-independent applications. The later version extends HbbTV technology by a dynamic adaptive streaming, common encryption scheme and enhanced support for EPG (from Now/Next to 7day schedule).
The latest version (v2.0, published in 2015) brings a lot of new features to make HbbTV services more attractive for users and service providers as well such as improved support for HTML5, support for companion screens applications (launch and synchronization), improved synchronization between application and content (media), advert insertion into VoD content, support for push VoD services, support for new HEVC video compression standard, etc. [4].