HEd: A Flexible HbbTV WYSIWYG Visual Authoring Tool

In the last years, no significant progress has been made towards making interactive TV a relevant tool for average household members. There is no big offer in terms of interactive content; hence, most viewers are familiar only with HD broadcasting. Due to its complexity, technical terms, high costs, and the fact that these technologies are usually designed from scratch, it is not commonly used by viewers. This paper is based on the HbbTV specification (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV), which has been adopted in various nations around the globe. The official statistic on HbbTV's website show approximately 300 deployed services, thus, the average, since 2009, has been only around 3.12 services a month across the world. This paper presents HEd (HbbTV Editor) as a flexible visual authoring tool which aims to reduce the development time, complexity and costs of creating applications. In addition, HEd aims to develop improved interactive applications related to the broadcasted signal. These contents may include culture and education as it will be shown in the present case study. In it, an application about an African-Colombian culture-related children's TV show is presented, where viewers can actually interact by playing the cultural musical instruments or watching some of the traditional music groups.