Acknowledging that it was “great” that a lot of innovation was happening in connected TV, Simon Gauntlett, Technology Director at the Digital TV Group (DTG) has declared that to achieve a mass-market solution, which ensures consumers enjoy a great experience, common standards need to be agreed and adopted across the industry.

He told delegates at a Westminster eForum seminar on IPTV, connected TV and the future set-top box, that these standards needed to be backed up by a conformance regime, and that the DTG was currently carrying out such activities for Freeview, Freesat and the ‘Digital Tick’ device programme.

Seeking to dispel a couple of myths, he stressed that what the DTG was doing with standards was not a competitor to the HbbTV standard espoused in mainland Europe, nor the UK’s open IPTV platform YouView.

“What we’re trying to do is take these international standards and import them into the UK. We’ve made modifications to make it work in the UK market. In fact we’ve now fed that back into HbbTV for their next generation of standards across Europe.”

He noted that the YouView consortium saw the DTG’s D-Book 7 set of standards as the core foundation for what YouView was built on, to which some innovation had been added on top because of specific platform requirements. “So what we’re doing is trying to get industry together to agree common standards to ensure the industry in connected TV all works together and interoperates so that what the consumer gets is a good experience,” he concluded.

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Categories: Articles, Connected TV, HbbTV, OTT