Saint Girons named HD Forum chief, httv teams up with Arantia

Interactive TV technology specialist httv’s CEO Régis Saint Girons has been named as the new president of the French HD Forum.

Saint Girons success Techncolor’s Jean-Pierre Lacotte, who will become president of honor of the HD Forum association after serving eight years as president.

The HD Forum was created in 2005 to coordinate industry players’ activities in HD. Lacotte’s term has seen it widen its scope and it is now an association of reference for the audiovisual industry across subjects including the improvement of TV audio, 3D, connected TV and DVB-T2.

Saint Girons, who in his time at Technicolor helped position MPEG as the solution for the US HDTV standard and who at OpenTV was one of the co-founders of the original HbbTV consortium, joined httv in 2012.

“The French HD Forum has been at the forefront of the Digital TV industry. Its unique combination of Broadcasters, Operators, Manufacturers, Editors and Technology providers has been instrumental to improve the quality of the Digital TV service. In particular its work on HbbTV 1.5 with the TNT2.0 specification has been a reference for many other European countries,” he said. “I am looking forward to keep driving this work further.”

Separately, httv will showcase a new solution for the IPTV market at ANGA COM in partnership with Televes unit Arantia.

Powered by Sigma’s SMP 8670 chipset, the Arantia Chronos set-top box is targeted at all IPTV markets.  httv’s open middleware will allow operators to extend IPTV with OTT streamed live channels, as well as catch-up, VOD and advanced interactive services based on HTML5 and HbbTV. Based on Linux and HTML 5, httvLink is pre-integrated and tested on key set-top chipsets vendor and on major CAS solutions such as Viaccess-Orca and Nagra.

This httvLink product features the HbbTV 1.0 implementation and will support an upgrade to HbbTV 1.5 bringing DRMs and MPEG-DASH features without any hardware modifications, according to httv.

Httv’s Saint Girons said: “httv is glad to announce this first integration of httvLink on an IPTV STB, from a leading company as Arantia. The joint product will offer a cost effective and feature full solution for IPTV and Pay TV markets.”

Arantia’s CEO Orestes Garcia said: “We are confident that this strategic alliance with Sigma Designs and httv will lead our company to higher stakes in coming years.”

Httv will exhibit at ANGA COM on Stand G37, hall 10.2