Unifying the Smart Home Experience Through HbbTV-enabled Devices

In the current context of seamless integration for a variety of devices within the Smart Home concept, the home TV screen has gained again a pivotal role in everyday life, acting as a central hub for audio and video broadcasting services, home automation and other devices, including smartphones, tablets and IoT - enabled devices. In this context, a standard compliant and platform independent solution for the television device is preferred as it can ensure a dynamic environment in which various devices are able to contribute to the overall user experience. This paper proposes an architecture which seamlessly integrates the consumer's phone and a smart home environment with a HbbTV-enabled television set, using the HbbTV 2.0 Companions Screen and Multimedia Synchronization framework. A first architectural design and its hardware implementation have been developed and deployed as a proof of concept. An initial set of tests has been conducted in order to assess the benefits of the proposed system.