Loading time optimization in broadcast TV applications

HbbTV, an emerging standard for interactive television, is being deployed in various European countries, creating bandwidth demand for interactive services in existing saturated broadcast networks. The problem of managing often-reused resources, such as script libraries, in broadcast interactive applications, becomes acute when trying to find a good compromise between bandwidth and waiting time. This paper explores the issues that TV channels have with on-air interactive applications and their optimized delivery. More specifically, this paper addresses the issue of data caching between broadcast carousel sessions as a way to optimize the bandwidth consumption of interactive applications. Proposed extensions to the current HbbTV specification to help solve the problem are given, and typical results include significant reduced waiting time, up to a factor of 3. The implementation complexity and other potential applications of the proposal are also discussed.