Digital TV Labs Offers Interoperability Testing For OTT, Hybrid And HbbTV Operators

Thursday, March 15th, 2012
Digital TV Labs logo

LONDON — IP&TV World Forum, Stand G12 – 20-22 March 2012 — Digital TV Labs, which provides independent, specialised receiver conformance products and services, has announced a turnkey solution enabling OTT operators to ensure seamless delivery of services based on its market-leading Ligada iSuite test server and test suite solution.

Ligada iSuite consists of a highly automated test harness and test suite covering HbbTV, OIPF, DRM and DASH adaptive streaming. The company is engaging with a number of hybrid platform operators to provide interoperability, functional and security tests.

Keith Potter, CEO says, “In a traditional pay-TV environment, the operator normally tightly specifies, procures and tests a small number of bespoke set-top-boxes, thus guaranteeing interoperability. In the fast-emerging OTT arena the operator delivers applications and services to a mixed array of retail receivers. Ensuring a quality consumer experience to protect a brand, minimise churn and to keep support costs low is a major challenge for these connected TV operators.”

Building on its long experience of specifying and testing interactive apps on retail receivers, Digital TV Labs provides a range of services centred on Ligada iSuite that can be tailored and augmented to each operator’s requirements to provide the optimum interoperability solution.

Digital TV Labs can offer existing extensive HbbTV 1.1 and 1.5 test suites including DASH adaptive streaming, as well as specific operator test case authoring, allowing users to build their own test suites. The company offers an outsourced test service in the UK and Hong Kong for receiver manufacturers, and in addition provides test servers covering prevalent DRM systems.

Digital TV Labs, HbbTV experts who are the single largest contributor to the imminent official HbbTV test suite, have an intimate knowledge of the standard. Potter added, “Our Ligada iSuite for HbbTV will enable interoperability by supporting country-specific HbbTV profiles, such as the French TNT2.0 platform, as they emerge. Operators need to have a test regime with either an approved receiver list, trusted certificate authentication or logo approval system in place otherwise apps simply won’t work.