Nothing to do with licensing, HbbTV was designed to be an open standard and is used by broadcasters around the world. In fact, it’s usage was nudged forward by the Beeb as a way of delivering a unified experience across platforms.
In this case, it’s simply that many steamed channels on DTT use Arqiva‘s backend product, which uses MHEG-IC. YouView doesn’t support this.
MHEG-IC is older than HbbTV, but there are more devices out there that support it through the Freeview spec, and unsurprisingly they couldn’t dump it without dropping support for a considerable number of devices.
When Arqiva became involved in YouView, a number of years back, they said they wanted to make these channels available to YouView users, so this essentially meant creating an HBbTV app that’ll pull in the stream when a YouView device is detected. It’s why the apps look a little different.
It’s a basic and crude way of getting it to work, and it’s only really used on single stream channels, or those with a dedicated HbbTV app of their own. For services with multiple streams, or those using only MHEG-IC, Arqiva would need to develop a different app just for YouView.
All this means, at least for the short to medium term is that YouView likely won’t be able to deliver the same streamed channel experience as Freeview Play devices might. Long term, everything should be ported from MHEG, but at the moment there are simply too many devices that use it.
