Brightcove adds support for HbbTV

Brightcove Launches Support for HbbTV Internet Video Delivery Standard

SYDNEY — Brightcove Inc. (NASDAQ: BCOV), a leading global provider of cloud services for video, today launched support for the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) standard, enabling broadcasters to combine over-the-air broadcast and IP delivery to publish personalized video and interactive TV experiences to users on connected TVs and set-top boxes. With today’s announcement, Brightcove is rolling out support in its Video Cloud online video platform for common encryption (CENC) packaging, Microsoft PlayReady and Marlin digital rights management (DRM) license serving, and multi-bitrate MPEG-DASH encoding.

“HbbTV is an enabling progression for us, and for the industry,” said Mat Yelavich, CTO of the Nine Network Australia. “As a broadcaster, it allows us to ‘close the loop’ for the first time, providing the potential to truly personalise whilst also empowering the viewer with a very simple UX. This, coupled with Brightcove’s Video Cloud platform providing support for MPEG-DASH and CENC, will ensure we deliver the viewer the best possible viewing experience.”.

HbbTV is an industry standard, providing an open technology platform that seamlessly combines TV services delivered via broadcast with services delivered via broadband, enabling access to Internet-only services for consumers using connected TVs and set-top boxes.

In the past, interactive television standards have had to rely on slow dial-up connections or expensive broadcast bandwidth to deliver applications and content. Standards like HbbTV take advantage of broad adoption of HD TVs and the wide-scale availability of broadband Internet connections to provide an outstanding user experience. Applications are broadcast with standard linear TV by broadcasters to Internet-connected televisions. Applications then access additional applications, data and non-linear video content from the Internet via the IP connection.

“HbbTV enables service providers to enhance the standard linear broadcast TV experience through personalization, enabling any broadcaster, including free-to-air providers, to deliver rich, interactive experiences to their customers,” said Anil Jain, SVP and GM, Media Group at Brightcove. “The Brightcove Video Cloud HbbTV solution enables the next generation of interactive TV by providing full support for the video workflow for HbbTV, making it easy for broadcasters to extend existing online video workflows to TVs and set-top boxes.”

In support of HbbTV in Video Cloud, Brightcove is now offering support for MPEG-DASH, an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP Web servers. Brightcove is also offering DRM packaging through CENC and license serving for Microsoft PlayReady and Marlin.