Representatives of public broadcaster RTVE and the commercial Antena 3 Group, along with Nagravision, Havas Media and Vodafone, have told the second annual conference of the Spanish interactive television association AEDETI of the imperative of adopting a single interactive TV standard.
Roberto Sánchez, director-general of telecommunications and information society, opened the congress by pointing towards France and Germany, where HBBtv had cut through as a common standard, despite manufacturers’ development of proprietary platforms.
María Maicas, deputy director of interactive media RTVE, explained the efforts of the public entity for public television was to reach the public through all the available screens. She said that the HbbTV standard “must be a reality that is also supported by other European public broadcasters. “We should not let each platform to impose its model and content operators have to adapt to them. The standard benefits us all.”
HBBtv is fast gaining ground in Europe with only the UK isolated through the support of the major public and commercial broadcasters, and ISPs, for the YouView platform. In addition to Spain there is also now interest from the Nordic countries, from the Czech Republic and Poland.
Recently, Mediaset España and Telefonica announced a strategic agreement to launch a pilot for the first HbbTV service in Spain. Mediaset’s Telecinco is bringing in content from Telefónica’s services such as Movistar Imagenio, Movistar Videoclub and Terra TV.
