On Virtualization of Red-Button Signaling in Hybrid TV

Abstract

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) is a European Hybrid TV standard that combines web-based technologies with traditional TV broadcast services. With the release of the HbbTV 2.0 specification in mid-February 2015, the HbbTV standard has begun to gain momentum worldwide, e.g. in North and South America, in Asia and in the UK. Indeed, the ATSC standard 3.0 in North America will be harmonized with the HbbTV 2.0 version. In Europe we have already faced the fact that the HbbTV device market has become very fragmented. This is due to versioning of the standard, various hardware capabilities of HbbTV devices or the lack of the HbbTV standard support on millions of devices. In this work we address the challenge of device fragmentation on the HbbTV market with a cloud-enabled HbbTV concept. This concept is based on the virtualization of HbbTV application signaling or the so-called Red-button signaling. The Red-button signaling is terminated, executed and handled within the Cloud in our approach. This work presents the architecture to enable the Cloud HbbTV approach and the implementation of this architecture. Finally, the architecture evaluation and corresponding challenges are presented.