Second connected television pilot test, within the European TV-Ring project

Within the framework of the TV-Ring research project on hybrid television HbbTV and on the occasion of the municipal elections, TV3, together with i2cat and Cellnex, will carry out a pilot test of the use of second screens in combination with live broadcasting on hybrid television on HbbTV.

This Thursday during the broadcast of the program .Cat, and on Sunday, coinciding with the special program on the municipal elections, TV3 will launch a new pilot test within the European project TV-Ring on hybrid television HbbTv, in which, in addition to the Catalan autonomous community, the i2CAT Foundation and Cellnex participate. Several homes in the town of Gurb, in the Osona region (Barcelona) will be able to test the use of second screens during the live broadcast of programming.

The first part of the tests will take place during the broadcast of the program .Cat this Thursday in which five electoral debates are broadcast offline, as well as on Sunday, coinciding with the special program on the municipal elections. Participants will be able to choose between different points of view of the programs, regardless of the conventional implementation.

The pilot tests involve the live broadcast of a program with several points of view and the use of a tablet application that acts as a remote control for the HbbTV application that is viewed on television. Using the tablet allows you to switch between the different possible contents more comfortably and quickly and, therefore, improve the user experience on HbbTV. In order to use the tablet, a pairing process must first be carried out between the two devices (the television set and the tablet), so that the television identifies the tablet as its remote control.

To carry out these tests, TV-Ring has a small group of homes in the town of Gurb that have HbbTV television sets and also a fiber optic installation that allows high-quality video transmission.

The TV-Ring project aims to test the HbbTV standard based on hybrid television of adaptive quality depending on the capacity of the communications network where viewing takes place.

This project is co-financed by the European Union and co-participated by Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg-RBB and Institut für Rundfunktechnik-IRT (Germany), Stichting Nederlandse Omroep Publieke-NPO and People’s Playground (Holland), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and TV3, i2cat and Cellnex (Spain).

Gurb, center of pilot tests

In December, the town of Gurb, in Osona, became the center of the pilot tests of the European research project TV-Ring. Since then, selected homes participate in pilot tests aimed at advanced connected television scenarios that the development of the new HbbTV standards facilitates.

To carry out these tests, the town of Gurb was chosen because this municipality of Osona has an extensive fiber optic network that Guifi.net, a telecommunications operator and collaborator of the pilot, has been deploying in recent years.

To carry out the tests, the three Catalan partners of the project have provided, during the duration of the pilot, a state-of-the-art television set in each of the 21 homes that have volunteered to participate in the tests. In return, these families have acquired the commitment to participate in different activities to evaluate and monitor the operation of the applications developed during the pilot. Once the pilot is completed, it is expected that the most interesting services will be made available to all members of the public who have an HbbTV 1.5 television set at home.