DVB-I: The Quiet Standard That Could Reunify a Fragmented TV World

By Mika Kanerva, Sofia Digital

The broadcast industry has spent the better part of a decade debating how to survive the platform era — how to stay discoverable on smart TV home screens controlled by platform companies, like for example Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. How to compete for advertising budgets migrating to digital and social media, how to serve audiences that have scattered across devices, apps, and delivery networks. The “Live TV” has become just one of the many applications for modern TV receivers, and the discovery of all the publicly valuable TV services is becoming increasingly difficult. Most of the proposed solutions address one piece of the problem at a time.

For the TV, DVB-I addresses the whole thing at once. It is not widely understood outside the standards and technical community, and that is a commercial mistake the industry is still making.

What DVB-I Actually Does

DVB-I — formally ETSI TS 103 770 — is a service discovery and delivery abstraction standard. In plain terms: it defines a common way for a device to find and access TV services regardless of how those services are delivered. Terrestrial, satellite, cable, IPTV, 5G broadcast — from the application and viewer perspective, they all look the same. The delivery bearer becomes invisible.

This sounds modest. It is not.

The reason it matters is that the fragmentation currently damaging broadcaster interests is not primarily a content problem or a production problem. It is a service layer problem. Every delivery network, every platform, every device ecosystem has its own service discovery mechanism, its own EPG, its own prominence logic. Broadcasters have to negotiate separately with each one, implement separately for each one, and accept whatever prominence position each one chooses to grant them.

DVB-I inserts a standards-based service layer below that ecosystem layer. A broadcaster that publishes a DVB-I service list is reachable by any DVB-I compliant device or application, on any network, with consistent metadata, consistent service identity, and — critically — prominence that is defined by the broadcaster and the regulator, not by a platform operator’s commercial algorithm.

The Prominence Problem — and Why DVB-I Is the Answer

The central regulatory crisis in broadcast right now is prominence. In the channel-based world, “TV1” was guaranteed to be found. EPG position 1, must-carry obligations, physical dial position — the whole system was engineered to ensure public service media was the path of least resistance for audiences.

In the application-based world, that guarantee has evaporated. A national broadcaster’s app competes for home screen real estate on the same commercial terms as a foreign streaming service. Smart TV manufacturers and app store operators make placement decisions based on commercial agreements and platform strategy, not public interest obligations. There is no technical or regulatory mechanism in most markets that currently prevents a nationally funded public broadcaster from being buried three menus deep on the most popular connected TV platform in the country.

Regulatory responses have been slow and partial. Several markets — the UK, Germany, France, Australia — have initiated reviews of prominence frameworks. None has comprehensively resolved the problem, because extending must-carry and prominence obligations to app stores and smart TV home screens requires either new primary legislation or a level of regulatory ambition that most jurisdictions have not yet demonstrated.

DVB-I offers a different path: solve the problem technically rather than waiting for regulation to catch up. A device, like a normal TV set or application that implements DVB-I, discovers services from a standards-based service list, not from a platform-curated app store. Prominence and position in that list are determined by local industry and stakeholders — which can be a national regulator, public and private broadcasters, or an industry collaboration — not by a commercial intermediary with conflicting interests.

This does not eliminate the need for regulation. In fact, successful deployment of DVB-I should include strong cooperation with the national TV regulator. Platform operators still control home screens and default applications. But DVB-I gives regulators a concrete technical hook: mandate DVB-I support in connected TV devices sold in a market, and the prominence problem becomes enforceable in a way that app store negotiations never could be.

The Application Layer

DVB-I extends beyond service discovery and delivery routing — it also defines how interactive applications are delivered alongside or instead of video. Each service in a DVB-I environment can run its own media player, giving broadcasters direct control over playback behaviour rather than depending on a platform-provided player with its own feature constraints and data boundaries. In parallel, DVB-I supports HTML-based interactive applications — HbbTV being the most established example in European markets — running alongside the video stream within the service context. This means a broadcaster can deliver catch-up, enhanced graphics, voting, or second-screen synchronisation without routing through a third-party platform layer.

DVB-I also accommodates a more radical model: the service itself can be an application. Rather than a traditional linear stream with an overlay, the entire user-facing experience can be an HTML-based application that DVB-I delivers and identifies as a service. This opens the door to fully branded, broadcaster-controlled experiences on connected TV devices that are indistinguishable in the service list from conventional broadcast channels.

The Advertising and Data Layer

DVB-I’s role in the advertising and data ecosystem is less often discussed but equally significant.

One of the structural disadvantages broadcasters face in competing for advertising budgets is fragmentation of audience measurement. GRP — Gross Rating Points, the traditional trading currency of TV advertising — works reliably for linear TV measured by a trusted panel. It breaks down across a fragmented delivery landscape where the same viewer might be reached via DTT, IPTV, broadcaster VOD, or a third-party CTV platform, each measured by a different system with different impression definitions and no reliable deduplication.

A DVB-I service layer creates a common service identity that persists across delivery bearers. That persistent identity is the foundation for consistent cross-platform audience measurement — the same viewer watching the same service over terrestrial, satellite or IP can be recognised as watching the same service, enabling the kind of deduplicated, cross-bearer measurement that advertisers need before they will shift budgets at scale.

The application layer capabilities reinforce this. Because each service runs its own media player and HTML-based applications within its own context, audience and interaction data stays within the broadcaster’s boundary rather than being captured by a platform intermediary. Targeted advertising, content interaction, and viewer behaviour signals can be collected, processed, and activated by the broadcaster directly — without depending on a platform operator’s data-sharing terms. For services delivered as full applications, that control extends to the entire user experience and everything it generates.

This is not a theoretical future market. HbbTV-based addressable advertising already represents hundreds of millions of euros in annual revenue across European markets, built on years of investment in infrastructure, advertiser relationships, and targeting capabilities. What makes it resilient is precisely what DVB-I extends: HbbTV runs independently of the underlying TV operating system, giving broadcasters a consistent application environment regardless of whether the device runs Tizen, webOS, Android TV, or any other platform. DVB-I carries that OS-independence intact into the all-IP era.

What Adoption Actually Requires

DVB-I’s potential is real. Its adoption to date has been slower than the opportunity warrants, and the reasons are worth being clear-eyed about.

Device manufacturers need to implement DVB-I client support. This is technically straightforward but requires commercial motivation. Regulatory mandates in individual markets — the most likely forcing function — have not yet materialised at scale, though the DVB Project and HbbTV Association’s DVB-I profile work represent meaningful progress.

Broadcasters and operators need to include their services into DVB-I service lists. This requires investment in service list infrastructure and metadata management, but it is well within the capability of any organisation already running OTT and HbbTV services. Broadcasters with established HbbTV addressable advertising operations have more at stake in DVB-I adoption than is perhaps widely recognised — it is the mechanism that preserves their OS-independent application environment, and the revenue that depends on it, also in the households that no longer have an antenna or satellite dish anymore. 

Platform operators — the smart TV manufacturers and aggregator platforms that control home screens — have mixed incentives. Aggregator platforms have the least motivation to adopt a standard that reduces their gatekeeping power, and this is where regulatory pressure is most needed and most absent.

Smart TV manufacturers, however, face a different calculation: DVB-I support makes the television set itself the primary access point for broadcast services, reducing viewer dependence on operator set-top boxes and strengthening the case for buying a better screen rather than a cheaper one with a box on top. For device manufacturers competing in a market where software differentiation increasingly matters, native DVB-I support is an opportunity as much as an obligation.

Regulators need to understand DVB-I well enough to mandate it. That requires engagement between the standards community and policy makers that is still in early stages in most markets.

The window for DVB-I to shape the next generation of connected TV is not unlimited. Platform ecosystems are consolidating. Device software is being updated on cycles that favour incumbent discovery mechanisms. Standards that are not mandated or widely adopted in the next three to five years risk being bypassed entirely as platform-native discovery becomes entrenched.

Finally, the Joker in broadcasting — 5G Broadcast

Every deck has a joker. In broadcasting, that card is 5G broadcast — promising to change the game for the better part of a decade, repeatedly picked up, examined, and put back down.

The appeal is genuine. One transmitter serving 70,000 concurrent stadium viewers is orders of magnitude more efficient than 70,000 simultaneous unicast streams. The sustainability argument is real, the spectrum efficiency is real, and the mass-event use case is compelling. But the joker only wins if someone actually plays it.

The structural barriers are not trivial. 5G-BC requires chipset support that device manufacturers have shown no urgency to include, spectrum allocation that regulators have not prioritised, and a consumer proposition that is essentially invisible to end users — a classic chicken-and-egg problem that the industry has been circling without resolution. Meanwhile, CDN investment and adaptive bitrate streaming have made unicast delivery workable in contexts where 5G-BC was expected to be necessary. The market worked around the problem rather than waiting for the solution.

The realistic outlook is a permanent niche: stadium deployments, emergency resilience, markets where spectrum and regulatory conditions happen to align. The window for mainstream adoption is narrowing as platform-native delivery entrenches and device chipsets consolidate without broadcast receivers.

This is where DVB-I matters regardless of how the 5G-BC story ends. Because DVB-I abstracts the delivery bearer, a broadcaster already publishing a DVB-I service list is ready to integrate 5G broadcast the moment it becomes viable — no rebuild, no renegotiation, no visible change for the viewer. And if 5G-BC never arrives at scale, DVB-I delivers its value across every other bearer regardless.

The joker may never get played. DVB-I means it stays in the deck.

The Opportunity, Plainly Stated

DVB-I is the most technically coherent answer to the most significant structural problem in broadcast: the loss of a standards-based, regulator-accountable service layer between content and audience.

For broadcasters, it offers consistent discoverability across delivery bearers — and unified application environments securing the addressable advertising business — without depending on platform operator goodwill.

For regulators, it offers a concrete technical hook for prominence obligations that extends meaningfully beyond the EPG era — and a practical instrument for ensuring public service media and national broadcasting industries remain discoverable and viable in an IP-only world.

For the advertising ecosystem, it lays the foundation for cross-bearer measurement standardisation — the actual prerequisite for advertising budget reallocation at scale.

None of this happens automatically. It requires action from broadcasters, regulatory ambition from policy makers, and — most challenging — sufficient pressure on the TV manufacturers to support a standard that does not necessarily serve their commercial interests. That is a hard coordination problem.

But the alternative is a connected TV landscape where access to public media is permanently mediated by a small number of platform gatekeepers with no public interest obligations. That outcome is worse for audiences, worse for democratic media ecosystems, and ultimately worse for an industry that still has real assets to build on.

DVB-I is not a silver bullet. It is, however, the best available tool for the job — and the industry should be treating it with the urgency that warrants.