Oettinger singled out the next generation 5G mobile communications standard, which was a major focus at MWC 2016, as a rallying point for convergence. He announced the Commission would work with the cellular industry to prepare a coordinated 5G action plan for adoption in Europe by the end of 2016 that should take account not just of the telecoms industry but also other vertical sectors, especially media and broadcasting.

The mobile industry is itself taking more account of video in development of 5G than previous generations, because of the growth in consumption fueled partly by the boom in tablets and large smartphones, which is exerting pressure on their networks and creating demand for better QoS (Quality of Service) from subscribers. All forms of video are contributing to this pressure and needing higher QoS, but there is a distinction between AV (Audio Video) services, primarily TV, and other forms of video like gaming, conferencing and surveillance. Oettinger was focusing mostly on AV, which brings other factors into the equation as well as basic QoS and capacity, including the impact of content production workflows and the balance between unicast for on demand services and broadcast or multicast for popular content. The mobile industry is now embracing LTE Multicast for distribution of popular content to reduce consumption of bandwidth on both backhaul and Radio Access networks and this is one area where there is potential for synergy with broadcasting under 5G. The arrival of Ultra HD TV and ever higher reclusion devices will only drive consumption further, increasing interest among mobile operators in partnerships with broadcast satellite, terrestrial and cable networks which have been engineered for delivery of such services and at least in some cases have plenty of capacity.

Traditionally technology and infrastructures for AV and mobile have followed separate tracks aimed at rather different requirements, but more recently have started to converge at the core. There has also been growing overlap in terms of target audience and services with the rise of OTT and TV Everywhere. As 5G appears on the horizon the distinction between on-demand and broadcast will also start to blur with growing use of predictive download to overcome capacity constraints for accessing on-demand content. Under predictive download, popular un-scheduled content can be downloaded at times of lighter traffic over cellular networks on the basis of individual user preferences. But such content can also be sent over broadcast networks on a pre-emptive basis, which after all is what a lot of satellite and some DTT operators have been doing for years over their infrastructures to make up for lack of a return path.

More recently some of these infrastructures have started to address the needs of mobile services, for example with DVB-T2 Lite, the stripped down version of the DVB’s second generation digital terrestrial standard introduced back in 2011. T2 Lite is a sub-set of the T2-base profile, allowing more efficient receiver designs for mobile devices by reducing complexity for stripped down services, while improving reception indoors and in fringe areas. It is simulcast alongside the full profile, so that an operator or broadcaster can serve both traditional linear and mobile services at the same time.

There is scope for convergence between T2 Lite and 5G to enable converged media services combining mobile broadband with TV. That raises one or two questions like what will happen to current hybrid broadband standards and in particular HbbTV, which originally emerged as a joint French/German initiative for interactive TV but evolved into a full hybrid offering integrating broadband and broadcast. On the face of it HbbTV has been a success story, having gained adoption beyond its European heartlands in countries such as Australia and Saudi Arabia, with interest shown in the US, Japan and China as well as Argentina.

But HbbTV has run into some problems accommodating TV Everywhere and OTT, largely through being a bit too monolithic and inflexible. It has suffered from various issues around incompatibility and testing, with some HbbTV apps not working because they have not faithfully reflected the underlying specification for example. There have been issues where the service fails to work properly with the wider ecosystem and incorporate multiple sources for dynamic content, or external CDNs. Sometimes geoblocking rules are not translated correctly by HbbTV and there have also been a few security concerns. None of these problems are insurmountable but do give the impression of HbbTV getting out of its depth as it scales by geography and content sources and it may be too unwieldy a platform for the world of OTT, especially mobile.

The game has moved on and HbbTV, having already been reinvented once to incorporate broadband, may fail to make the further jump to distributed OTT and mobile. Some of its work though may well fold into the initiatives being promoted now by the EU among others, as the ground is prepared for a push towards greater reconciliation between mobile and broadcasting. There is growing recognition in both camps of the need for compromise, driven by industry and consumer trends, as well as by the rapid rise up the agenda of audience measurement and big data analytics. Service providers and advertisers are increasingly seeking a common view of their audiences, which in turn draw ever less distinction between TV and mobile, as witnessed by the fast disappearance of the dedicated secondary TV set.