Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) is a pan-European initiative that aims at complementing the broadcasting of informative, educative or entertaining audio-visual and textual content to the consumers via broadband. Version 1.1.1.06 of the specification was standardised by ETSI in June 2010. Since HbbTV involves, similar to NoTube, the merging of broadcast and online services, many people wonder whether there is actually a difference between NoTube and HbbTV. And if yes, what it was.

Consequently, we decided to discuss this topic with some HbbTV experts at IRT. They explained us in detail what HbbTV is really about and we explained to them the three NoTube use cases. Then, we elaborated together if the NoTube use cases could be realised following the HbbTV standard.

We found out that use case scenarios similar to the NoTube use cases could be realised with HbbTV, too. But the general approach of HbbTV is slightly different from the NoTube approach: In contrary to NoTube, which aims at providing general solutions across all electronic media services, HbbTV is a more broadcast centric and programme related approach to the connection of broadcast and the Web. It aims at providing additional information or content which is related to one broadcasting service. Since non-broadcast related HbbTV applications are stopped once they tune to a DVB service, cross-service HbbTV applications require negotiations with all service providers involved. Nevertheless, research results from the NoTube project, e.g. recommender technologies, could potentially be used in HbbTV applications.

The full report about this analysis can be found here.