Winners revealed across four categories, while recipients of IBC2026’s International Honour for Excellence, Best Technical Paper and IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2025 presented with their awards

IBC has unveiled the winners of the prestigious IBC2026 Innovation Awards at an event held at the RAI Amsterdam, honouring collaborative projects that tackle longstanding challenges and advance the global media, entertainment and technology industry.

The Innovation Awards celebrate collaborative, real-world breakthroughs across four categories – Content Creation, Content Distribution, Content Everywhere and Social Impact. The awards recognise projects bringing organisations and technology partners together to address some of the media industry’s most significant challenges, with this year’s winners spanning open-source media workflows, live news distribution, the convergence of broadcast and broadband, and AI-powered accessibility. The event also honoured the recipients of IBC’s International Honour for Excellence, the Best Technical Paper and the IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2025.

“Our 2026 IBC Innovation Awards winners share a common thread in breaking down previously insurmountable geographical, language, and organisational barriers to open media workflows,” said Fergal Ringrose, Chair of the Innovation Awards Jury. “Each winner realises a transformational environment for collaborative, cloud-native, software-first digital ecosystems.”

The 2026 IBC Innovation Awards winners across the four categories were:

Content Creation
Media eXchange Layer (MXL) – An open-source initiative established by the European Broadcasting Union in collaboration with the North American Broadcasters Association, hosted by the Linux Foundation and deployed by CBC/Radio-Canada. The project involved contribution from a wide range of industry partners.

Content Distribution
Capacity that follows the live news story – Reuters replaced fixed-capacity infrastructure with a Global Shared Memory ecosystem powered by TVU Networks’ MediaMesh, enabling event-driven, API-orchestrated news distribution, including partner integrations: InSync, Kinetiq, Sony, Elecard and TAG Video Systems.

Content Everywhere
Implementation of DTV+ in Brazil – Through DTV+, Globo has combined the reach of free-to-air television with the personalisation and measurability of digital media. By integrating broadcast and broadband, it reconnects mass audiences with digital capabilities. The project involved collaboration across government, broadcasters and industry.

Social Impact
Closing the sign language gap – G&L Systemhaus brought together AI company Signapse, software company Norsk/id3as and CDN provider Akamai to build a broadcast-grade, AI-powered sign language solution for live and on-demand streaming.

Additional awards previously announced and presented at the event included:

International Honour for Excellence (IHFE)
This year’s IHFE was awarded to Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recognising the company’s decades of innovation in live Olympic sports production and its significant impact on the global broadcast industry. Through advances in ultra-high-definition production, immersive audio, remote production workflows, artificial intelligence, cloud-based technologies and next-generation storytelling, OBS has helped transform how audiences around the world experience the Olympic Games.

Best Technical Paper
The award for Best Technical Paper was given to Emma Maier, Jodie Pearton, Anna Stewart, Arina Mnatsakanyan and Jonathan Freeman, of i2 media research, for their paper titled Measuring and reducing interaction barriers in internet-delivered tv systems through age-informed human factors design. The paper explores how internet-delivered TV can be made easier for older viewers, identifying design barriers that can make everyday tasks harder and demonstrating how an optional age-informed overlay interface can support more confident, independent viewing.

IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2025

Selected from the Challenges showcased at IBC last year, the 2025 Accelerator Project of the Year was presented to AI Agent Assistants for Live Production. The project demonstrated an AI Assistant Director acting as an orchestrator of a suite of production agents, enabling simpler voice control and natural language coordination of complex control room workflows. The project also developed an open, vendor-agnostic framework for AI agents working across live production, with an emphasis on augmenting human decision-making while maintaining editorial control. It was Championed by broadcasters ITN, BBC and Channel 4, with Participant vendors CUEZ, Amira Labs, Highfield AI, Monks, CuePilot, Shure, EVS, Moments Lab and Google Cloud.

About IBC

Delivering innovation and empowering people, IBC is where the future of the global Media and Entertainment industry is defined and actioned. Energising the market, enabling content everywhere and inspiring new conversations, IBC brings the creative, technology and business communities together to collaborate, learn and unlock new opportunities.

At IBC2026, exhibitors and speakers from around the globe will showcase game-changing innovations and tackle the media sector’s most pressing trends and issues – changing perceptions and meeting the needs of the world-leading broadcasters, content owners, rightsholders, service providers and others attending the four-day conference and trade show. With a focus on inclusivity, IBC propels change – driving thought leadership, sparking discussion, shifting expectations, accelerating creativity and enabling real business outcomes.

IBC’s mission is to empower our 250,000-strong global community to explore new opportunities, build knowledge, and play an active role in the technological transformation and broader change sweeping the industry worldwide.

For further information, please visit: https://show.ibc.org/