HbbTV or Teletext v3.0

Greetings to you, habrasoobschestvo!



Having not found any articles on Habré about the technology Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV), I decided to share my knowledge and write an introductory article about it.

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Since there is simply no Russian-language article about HbbTV on Wikipedia (link to English: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Broadcast_Broadband_TV ), I’ll tell you a little about HbbTV itself. HbbTV is a television standard for transmitting information and "entertainment" through TV channels and / or broadband Internet. In fact, HbbTV is an advanced version of the body of the text on TVs (a la teletext v3.0), with full graphics, audio, video and is interactive (if the information is transmitted via the Internet).



At the moment, channels with HbbTV support are broadcast in Germany and France, other EU countries also plan to add support in the near future. The standard is still very young, the first demonstrations were shown in the 2009th year, and since then there has been an active development of devices with HbbTV support.

How it works

The whole standard is based on a slightly modified HTML-e, called CE-HTML (Consumer Electronics HTML). There is support for JavaScript (EcmaScript), CSS and DOM. HbbTV-program is, in fact, a CE-HTML site, up to 1280x720px in size, which is called by pressing a special button on the control panel.



An HbbTV program can be either tied to a particular TV show or channel, or it can be launched in the background. If the program is tied to a particular TV show, then it displays certain information that complements the TV show. When the telecast ends (or the viewer switches the channel), the HbbTV program closes.



As mentioned above, the data for the HbbTV application can be transmitted both through the television channel itself (digital signal) and through the Internet. HbbTV always first checks for the presence of the Internet, and only in its absence does it check whether there is HbbTV data in the digital signal. Transmission "by cable" is used very rarely, since interactivity is lost (all users see the same thing). You can appreciate all the beauty of HbbTV only with broadband internet connected.



HbbTV-program can be opened or closed at any time. At one time, only one program can be started, i.e. there is no multitasking support and, judging by the specifications, it is not planned.



All HbbTV devices support content restriction by age for both TV shows and HbbTV applications.

Examples

Here are a few examples to better understand what it is and why it is needed.

HbbTV programs with additional information

HbbTV-program for the Olympic Games, displaying the time of the current and next transfer of the Olympic Games, as well as 3 leading countries in the number of medals.

News Center on HbbTV

In addition to the latest news release and the text version of the news (a la google news), you can see the weather for several days, sports news, etc. Please note that the current TV show is displayed in the bottom left corner.

Media archive

German TV channels also offer the opportunity to completely legally watch all the broadcast TV shows over the past 7 days! Now you do not need to record a television series at a certain time or download it from the Internet. True, in Germany there is a special tax on the support and development of television and radio broadcasting, so cheese is not free.

Advertising on HbbTV

There are also ideas for creating HbbTV programs for advertising. For example, during the display of advertisements about trips to Turkey, you can open the HbbTV application and immediately book tickets. I have not yet seen any real examples, but the developments have met, I think that the emergence of such programs is not far off.

Radio

In the HbbTV standard, there is also radio support. When you switch to the channel of the radio station, you can see both the name of the current song and the track list of the last 5 (or more) songs played.

Widgets

Of course, it is possible to create all kinds of widgets, such as mini-programs and simple games that are not tied to TV shows. These can be programs like Apps, or games.

Iron

In terms of devices, there are 2 options. Or buy a TV that supports HbbTV and is equipped with Ethernet or WiFi. Or buy a receiver with HbbTV support. On the control panel there are 4 special buttons for controlling HbbTV-programs. Red, green, yellow and blue. Red is usually used to call or end programs, the rest are configured by the program itself. This is the only innovation at the level of iron, everything else is software.

At last

The HbbTV standard only provides for the use of CE-HTML technology; there is no talk of support for Flash or HTML5. HbbTV displays video and audio through special DOM objects. XMLHttpRequest support is present, so it is theoretically possible to write AJAX applications.