The pan-European HbbTV consortium continues the push for global acceptance of the hybrid TV standard and appoints two marketing group co-chairs-- industry experts Kirk Edwardson and Régis Saint Girons.

Edwardson is current head of marketing and sales engineering at on-demand TV software and solutions vendor Espial, while Saint Girons is the CEO of digital and connected TV solution provider httv.

The consortium also announces new HbbTV deployments in Europe, Australia, Malaysia and Vietnam, and the standard is also ganing supporters in the Americas, Chine and Japan.

"Over the last several years HbbTV has gained significant market momentum and international support," HbbTV president Klaus Illgner says. "We're very pleased with this growth and look to further increase the presence of HbbTV in Europe and the rest of the world with a renewed marketing focus that will push hybrid television services closer toward becoming a standard feature on connected TVs everywhere."

Established in 2010, the HbbTV consortium consists of over 60 TV broadcasters and CE companies pushing the open and business-neutral technology combining TV broadcasts with broadband services.

HbbTV is built around CE-HTML (a subset of XHTML optimised for TVs and STBs) and incorporates key elements of the OIPF (Open IPTV Forum) broadcast specification, such as JavaScript APIs allowing static web pages to work inside broadcast application environments.

The standard is currently in version 1.2.1 and is already available in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Go HbbTV