US company Verance has developed a watermark proposition that enables the implementation of the newly released “Application Discovery over Broadband” extension to the HbbTV specification.

The normal HbbTV triggers are not forwarded over the HDMI connection between set-top-box and HbbTV enabled television sets. HbbTV is therefore dependant on the set-top-box being HbbTV enabled, which it often not is.

Through watermarking the needed HbbTV information is transported through a watermark in the signal, and therefore is transported over HDMI. HbbTV enabled televisions that are capable of extracting the needed information from the watermark are then able to access the HbbTV information belonging to the channel selected for viewing.

Click here to download the Verence PDF about HbbTV watermarking: Watermark Overview November 2019