5th FOKUS Media Web
Symposium

May 20–21, 2015 – Fraunhofer FOKUS

Stefan Arbanowski

Director Competence Center FAME

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Fraunhofer FOKUS

Dr. Stefan Arbanowski, born 1973, is director of the Competence Centre Future Applications and Media (FAME) at Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS in Berlin, Germany. Stefan Arbanowski received his Ph.D and M.Sc. in computer science from the Technical University Berlin (TUB), Germany. He gave lectures in broadband networks, mobile communications, service platform, and middleware technologies at TUB. Since 1995, he coordinated several national and international research projects related to service platforms, unified messaging, rich media, IPTV, mobile and personal communications.

 

Currently, he is managing Fraunhofer FOKUS’ NewTV activities, bundling expertise in the areas of interactive applications, web technologies, streaming and connectedTV – channeling those towards networked media environments featuring live, on demand, context-aware, and personalized interactive content.

 He is steering board member of European Technology Platform (ETP) Networked and Electronic Media (NEM) and use to serve in steering board of eMobility ETP and was chairman elect of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) Service Platform Working Group. At Bitkom he is chairing the NewTV working group. Besides telecommunications and distributed service platforms, he has published more than 80 scientific papers in respective journals and conferences in the area of personalized service provisioning. He is member of various program committees of international conferences.

Talks

View Program

  • Introduction

    According to BITKOM, various Flat-TV devices were sold in the German market for 4.6 bn Euro in 2014 (Source: GfK, EITO). Together with Set-Top-Boxes and Game Consoles, this value represents more than 50 % of the consumer electronics market and thus, indicates a high interest in moving picture services on the first screen. Moreover, almost everyone (87 %) under 30 is using video streaming services and over 40 % already streams several times a week (Source: Aris, BITKOM).

    This booming tendency explains the high interest in hybrid devices, displaying IP-based services on the big screen. The term SmartTV is a made-up word in allusion to the term SmartPhone. It specifies the ability of a TV device to do more complex tasks than originally destined. Today TV sets are called SmartTVs, or Hybrid TVs, when they perform more than just showing broadcasted linear TV or standard teletext. In order to fulfil all requirements for displaying and interacting with web pages on TV screens, The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) published a specification in June 2010 – Hybrid Broadcast Broadband Television (HbbTV) defines the technical requirements for the interaction of television and internet and since that time, is extended in different iterations.

    Deep-Dive: The HbbTV technology stack

    This tutorial gives an overview on the current market situation of SmartTVs and HybridTV services in general as well as standardized technologies, such as HbbTV, in particular. It broaches the issue of a fragmented technology stack – both on a platform level (variety of hardware manufacturers and middleware solutions) and on a service level (e.g. different browsers, interpreters and services). In a deep dive session, we introduce the current versions of the standard, from HbbTV 1.0 to HbbTV 2.0, their main differences and characteristics. HbbTV applications may run in different modes: Broadcast independent applications are designed to run in the manufacturer’s service portal. In contrast, broadcast related app shall overlay the actual linear TV program. The hybrid standard combines both worlds, broadband and broadcast. Therefore, it re-uses different existing standards of the Open IPTV Forum (OIPF), the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the DVB-Project (DVB) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While Version 1.0 of HbbTV is based on a basic feature set in order to run on TV sets, such as HTML 4, DOM 2 and CSS 2, Adaptive Streaming via MPEG DASH and DRM functions extend Version 1.5. The current Version 2.0 offers a more advanced technology stack: offering primarily HTML 5, DOM 3 and CSS 3. In addition, many other features are leveraging this upcoming standard: e.g. Subtitles via TTML, Companion Screens, Discovery Protocols, Media Synchronization Mechanisms, WebSockets and Advertising approaches using multiple HTML5 media elements.

    Hands-on: Best practice for TV App development

    In a hands-on session, we will introduce a useful app development life cycle using emulators and live test environments consisting of test servers, playout systems and HbbTV compliant TV sets. We will discuss common issues during the development process; give practical recommendations for a broad device support and show examples as well as best practices in a live-programming demonstration.