Regardless of whether HbbTV is incorporated as a requirement or as an option within the seventh D-Book, YouView's absence within the DTG's announcement is conspicuous; it is interesting to examine the extent to which HbbTV and YouView could happily coexist in the UK market.

From a pure hardware perspective, it is conceivable that a single receiver could achieve technical compatibility with both the YouView and HbbTV specifications. However, as of yet, few signals from the market indicate that there is a strong likelihood of such an occurrence. Among the major vendors of STB and TV set software stacks - Opera Software, Ocean Blue, Strategy & Technology, Cabot, ANT, Access - a number of HbbTV solutions exist for OEMs and middleware vendors. In addition, at least one firm - Ocean Blue - has publicly committed to developing a YouView stack. Notwithstanding the existence of HbbTV solutions on the market, public commitment from one firm to develop a YouView solution in the future, and the fact that YouView's core technical specification has been available since April 2011, no single vendor has articulated intent to develop a joint HbbTV-YouView stack.

If the receiver market is to cleave across YouView and HbbTV devices, the broader question is whether broadcasters and content providers will support both specifications, or throw their weight disproportionately behind a single one. YouView has secured support from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, but this support does not mutually exclude the enthusiasm that UK FTA broadcasters have expressed for HbbTV more generally. With historical precedent as a guide, there is little reason to believe that content providers unilaterally object to supporting multiple connected platforms and specifications, even if UK broadcasters have yet to pledge, specifically, to develop HbbTV applications.

The BBC represents the most compelling example of multi-specification support. The broadcaster's iPlayer catch-up portal has been implemented across a huge range of connectable CE devices, on the Freesat DTH platform view the MHEG-5 IC specification, and on the Freeview platform - also via MHEG-5 IC - atop Sony Bravia TV sets and Sony HD DVR set-tops. With a full-blown Flash version likely to be used for YouView, and across the CE devices it currently supports, iPlayer has been made to run in HTML, MHEG, Flash, and Flash Lite environments.  Given Freesat's earlier decision in March 2011 to adopt HbbTV, the BBC should have little trouble also adapting its current HTML applications to conform to the CE-HTML environment used by HbbTV.

But even if broadcasters choose to support a multitude of platforms for their connected IP services, fragmentation of the receiver market between YouView and HbbTV devices could still contribute to de facto consolidation around a single platform. Considering that first-iteration YouView devices will require 950 DMIPS CPUs, at least 512 Mb of RAM, a 320GB internal hard disk, and dual DVB-T2 tuners, hardware prices alone could relegate these launch devices into a class not likely to purchased by the median UK TV household. HbbTV, by contrast, is nearly silent on the issue of hardware capability, and with deployment in France and Germany - not to mention existing integration onto Trident, Broadcom, and Sigma Designs system-on-chips - already has significant scale in the market. HbbTV's lean hardware requirements and scale create downward pressure on receiver prices, even if this is partially offset by the fact that TV set manufacturers have incentives to champion their proprietary, connected content platforms.