November 7, 2016

United Kingdom

General Information (Last Update April 2023):

26.97 Mln TV households (Q3 2020, source: BARB)

HbbTV – Key Facts:

HbbTV has been adopted by Freeview Play, ITV, Channel 4 & 5 and the BBC.

Freeview Play is offering programmes from BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4, My5 and UKTV Play all sitting alongside live television channels in the Freeview Play TV Guide.

Freesat has deployed “HbbTV like” OpApps services.

Addressable TV Market Status (souce: Dataxis, April 2023):

At the end of 2022, addressable TV advertising on HbbTV or on set-top boxes had been launched in just 17 countries across Europe. It came with some serious restrictions in a handful of these countries, limiting addressability to catch-up services only. Over a decade after the launch of Sky AdSmart in the UK, more than 5 years after the first addressable TV campaigns aired in Belgium, and just 2 years after the long-awaited launch of segmented TV in France, it’s time for a market review across the region.

The UK is by far leading the addressable TV industry: with its well-established solution AdSmart, it secures more than half of the sector’s revenues across the continent. AdSmart is proven to be a rolling success, and despite limited growth over the last few years as the product is already quite mature, it paved the way for what addressable TV stands for and should look like. It has been waved as the ultimate blueprint for every broadcaster and distributor that followed suit afterward. But not every actor could replicate the experience with such a favorable outcome, mostly because each TV and advertising market across Europe has its own specificities to account for that don’t always drive incentives to invest in addressability on the main screen (source: Dataxis, ”Addressable TV in Europe: where do we stand one decade after AdSmart?”, April 2023

HbbTV Connected Devices:

Count of devices that used Freeview Play within Q4 2019:  7.5 Mln