News & Insight   Article

September 2, 2024

HbbTV Developer Portal progress

An update from Matthew Huntington, the HbbTV Developer Programme Manager.

Back in June 2024 I took on the task of enhancing the HbbTV developer programme. My overall mission was to foster innovation with HbbTV through growing a vibrant developer community. A key activity for achieving this was to update and evolve the HbbTV Developer Portal, making sure it supports both novice and expert developers.

My first task was to review the existing site and material. I think it is fair to say that there is quite a lot of work to do. One key conclusion was that I will not be able to achieve this on my own. There is some good material on the site, but it is neither consistent nor complete. A novice developer would not find enough information in the tutorials to bootstrap their development. An expert developer cannot rely on the API reference to check the workings of a function, needing to delve into the original and often impenetrable specifications for this.

Despite its room for improvement, the site does have hundreds of monthly visitors. After the home page, the most popular page is a tutorial article on the HbbTV architecture. The site has visitors from around the world, 56 countries in total. The number of visitors from each country is a good indicator of where HbbTV services or development has some momentum.  In July the UK led with 26% of users, followed by Italy (9%), Germany (7%), Poland (7%) and India (5%). Other key HbbTV countries (Spain, France, Australia) are also in the top 10. 

HbbTV Developer Portal Users

I started by simplifying the site structure, removing some unnecessary areas to concentrate the content, making it more likely that a visitor will find useful content. For instance, the news and blog sections have been combined. Blogs with valuable technical insight have been added to the tutorial section as have the technical FAQs.  I’ve also been steadily adding to the tutorials with new material, initially covering subjects important to a new developer, such as what HbbTV emulators are available and how to install them.

A major decision has been made to change the tutorial section to be arranged as a user guide. This is to align the HbbTV Developer Portal with other developer information sources (such as the Apple developer documentation,  AWS documentation and the Mozilla developer site). Rather than have a flat collection of articles, this will be a hierarchical document arranged as chapters. This will require a lot of additional material, but the aim is to create a more usable information source. This creation of a user guide will go together with an updated API reference. This new version of the tutorial section is yet to be launched, but will be, once the structure is in place and there is a bit more content. 

Alongside the Developer Portal I want to provide a way for HbbTV developers to ask questions and exchange information. As I’ve mentioned there is a lot of work to do to get the HbbTV Developer Portal to be what we need it to be and I need help from the developer community to do this. I needed a way to effectively and efficiently communicate with them. I wanted a tool which I can use to quickly ask questions of a knowledgeable audience but doesn’t place any burden on them to respond. I also want others to be able to use the tool in the same way. There are lot of options, but after consulting with the community I’ve chosen to test Slack. Most developers have Slack running for communicating with other developers. Anyone is welcome to join the HbbTV Developer Slack community as long as they stick to the code of conduct. 

At the beginning of the summer, we launched a survey to get feedback on how people would like to see the Developer Portal evolve. This survey will be live for a couple more weeks and if you haven’t yet responded please do so. If you know an HbbTV developer who might not have read this, please pass the link on. 

https://us16.list-manage.com/survey?u=b2eb70b109f3e43045a7cf245&id=f1488de553&attribution=false

Matthew Huntington
HbbTV Developer Programme Manager

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