Addressable advertising initiatives scale up on HbbTV as the standard is projected to reach half of European households by 2026

Over half of all European households will be reachable on HbbTV by 2026 By the end of the year, an estimated 97 million unique households in Europe (excluding Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine) will be reachable on HbbTV interfaces. This number is growing rapidly as more households across the region acquire Smart TVs, with the vast majority of new sold TV sets in Europe supporting HbbTV standards. Our projections indicate that the number of households reachable via HbbTV will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17% from 2020 to 2026. By the end of this period, 120 million European households are expected to have at least one connected HbbTV television. This means that in just two years from now, half of all European households will be reachable on HbbTV standards. It’s important to note that "reachable households" refers to the potential audience, but the actual volume of HbbTV-equipped devices in circulation is much larger, as unique households can be equipped with several TV sets, and more devices have been sold than are currently in use.  Commercial broadcasters in Germany, Italy and Spain lead HbbTV addressable initiatives The largest markets in volume are the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain, which collectively will account for nearly 70 million unique reachable households by the end of 2024, over a total of 115 million households. These numbers have created interesting commercial opportunities for addressable TV advertising to be launched in these key European markets. In Germany, advertising campaigns utilizing HbbTV standards were initiated early. The two main commercial broadcasters' ad sales houses, SevenOne Media and RTL Ad Alliance, began offering addressable capabilities with this technology as early as 2016. As the HbbTV-equipped parc expanded in the country and new generations of the standard were implemented, addressable campaigns gradually transitioned from traditional L-shaped banners to seamless dynamic ad insertion (DAI) within linear channels’ streams. This evolution now allows German publishers to sell premium video ad inventory in a targetable ecosystem on larger screens. In Italy and Spain, two strong free-to-air (FTA) TV markets, addressable advertising was launched in 2016 and 2019, respectively. Mediaset led initiatives in Italy through its ad sales house, Publitalia, and progressively expanded its ad product portfolio from banners to ad insertion in catch-up video in 2019 and to linear DAI in 2020. In Spain, similar initiatives were launched by Mediaset’s Publiespana and Atresmedia Publicidad. The UK recently joined the bandwagon, with YouView launching its targetable offers based on HbbTV standards at the end of last year in partnership with private broadcasters. With the UK being the largest video advertising market in the region, the commercial potential is substantial. First, in terms of audience reach: according to YouView’s CEO, linear television...