July 16, 2025

HbbTV enables secure content delivery with new DRM specification

The HbbTV Association has announced a new specification for the integration of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in HbbTV implementations and services.

The specification, which was approved at the latest meeting of the HbbTV Steering Group, marks a significant step forward in enabling widespread secure delivery of premium content via HbbTV-based services. The new specification formalises the predictable and reliable use of DRM in HbbTV services, especially for applications approaching the complexity and content protection demands of Video-on-Demand (VOD) platforms.

While HbbTV has been used with DRM for many years, the HbbTV/DRM integration has previously been on an ad-hoc basis, led separately by a number of countries or markets with other countries or markets relying on the efforts of the leaders. There was no harmonised approach to benefit the entire ecosystem. With the growing importance of premium content and content owners’ requirements for their content to be secured, the need for a fully specified, interoperable DRM integration at the core of the HbbTV standard has become increasingly important.

“Over the past few years, we have observed that advanced HbbTV services often ran into technical challenges due to incomplete integration between HbbTV and DRM, even though most connected TVs already supported DRM at the device level,” said Vincent Grivet, Chair of the HbbTV Association. “This new specification provides predictability and reliability for the proper functioning of HbbTV applications in association with DRM, enabling our ecosystem to meet growing usage and more sophisticated HbbTV applications delivering advanced TV services.”

The newly approved specification formalises the integration of widely used DRM systems, specifically Microsoft PlayReady and Google Widevine, into the HbbTV framework. It builds on the experience gathered with HbbTV’s DASH-DRM Reference Application, which has already been adopted by many broadcasters and platform operators as a de facto standard for initial DRM implementation.

To support manufacturers and application developers, HbbTV is collaborating with leading hybrid TV platforms including tivù in Italy and Everyone TV in the UK as well as Google. These partnerships aim to integrate previous national-level or private DRM unit tests into the HbbTV Conformance Test Suite, ensuring seamless and consistent implementation across devices and markets.

The specification is available on the HbbTV website and is expected to be adopted by broadcasters, platform operators and hardware manufacturers in upcoming product cycles.