Following the publication of the Study Mission Report on Targeted Advertising (TA) in September, the DVB Steering Board has approved the creation of a dedicated TA group to implement the report’s recommendations. The CM-TA Group will be co-chaired by Vincent Grivet (TDF) and Angelo Pettazzi (Mediaset).

It is anticipated that the group will agree a set of Commercial Requirements (CR) for TA by June 2018. It is then expected that the draft specification would go before the DVB Steering Board for approval, and once approved could pave the way for the first market implementations in 2020.

In a joint comment, the CM-TA co-chairs said: “There is a genuine appetite for TA to be made available for classical broadcast television. This is accompanied by the overall feeling that with too many technical solutions there is a risk of fragmentation in the marketplace that would hinder any progress. This is where the work of DVB on TA can help unlock the full potential of TA in broadcast television.”

“With the formation of CM-TA, DVB shows that it is committed to remain the central hub where the specifications of the TV industry are written, and in this case in close cooperation with HbbTV,” stated DVB Chairman, Peter MacAvock.

Recognising that the overall advertising market is shifting rapidly towards digital, programmatic, targeted or addressable models and that that the underlying technologies for such solutions are predominantly proprietary and have a narrow scope, risking technology fragmentation which could act in adverse ways for the existing TV ecosystem, the DVB decided to set up a dedicated Commercial Module – Study Mission Group (SMG). Its purpose was to assess the relevance of generating a new DVB specification dedicated to enabling Targeted Advertising serving at the very least classical broadcast television.

The Study Mission Group published its final report in September 2017 which concluded the following:

• targeted advertising is very likely to take a very high commercial importance in the context of broadcast TV, and it is a high priority to enable broadcasters to offer such models to their advertising customers;
• no satisfactory, complete, open technology framework enabling TA in the context of horizontal broadcast TV is currently available, though HbbTV appears as a robust starting base;
• given the combination of the high commercial importance and the lack of a suitable enabling technical framework, it was advised that DVB should generate a dedicated DVB-TA specification (or technology framework) to fully enable TA, focusing on horizontal broadcast business models as a minimum;
• this DVB-TA framework should be generated in close cooperation with HbbTV, with a view to re-use all relevant existing (or future) HbbTV assets.

In November 2017, the DVB Steering Board approved the Study Mission Group report and the creation of a dedicated CM-TA commercial subgroup to be tasked to implement the TA SMG recommendations. Fellow standards initiative HbbTV and DVB have agreed to a tight cooperation for the work as set out by the liaison established between the two groups.

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