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Tag: IBC Innovation Awards

  • IBC 2025 brings the future of media to Amsterdam

    IBC 2025 brings the future of media to Amsterdam

    AMSTERDAM: Amsterdam’s RAI convention centre will become the global capital of media and technology from 12–15 September when IBC 2025 opens its doors to broadcasters, streamers, studios and tech firms from around the world.

    The show will run 10:30–18:00 on opening day, 09:30–18:00 across the weekend and close at 16:00 on Monday. Organisers have built the edition around the theme of innovation, with a newly minted Future Tech hub in Hall 14. Here visitors can test emerging tools such as artificial intelligence, cloud-native production workflows, augmented reality, virtual sets, immersive audio-visual formats and sustainability-driven hardware.

    A three-day conference, from 12–14 September, features more than 300 speakers drawn from major broadcasters, global streaming platforms, technology vendors and creative studios. Panels will probe platform evolution, revenue models, AI integration and the next wave of interactive storytelling. JioStar’s Prashant Khanna is one of the headlined speakers being featured at IBC this year. 

    Elsewhere, the IBC Innovation Awards will celebrate cutting-edge deployments, while the Accelerator Media Innovation Programme offers collaborative trials of experimental tech. Free-to-attend theatres and showcase stages promise continual demos and debate on content delivery, rights management, talent development and the fast-changing business landscape.

    Beyond the exhibition floor, organisers are pitching IBC 2025 as a working laboratory: a place where engineers, producers and executives can handle new kit, swap ideas and chart the next phase of global media transformation.

  • Sports innovation efforts lead at IBC2024 Innovation Awards

    Sports innovation efforts lead at IBC2024 Innovation Awards

    AMSTERDAM –The winners of the IBC Innovation Awards – which recognise collaborative efforts to develop solutions that address real-world industry challenges – were announced on 15 August at the Rai Amsterdam. They consisted of five categories: content creation, distribution, content everywhere, social impact, and environment and sustainability. 

    With 2024 being the year of big sporting events like the Olympics and UEFA European football championships, four of the five winners were those who had innovated in this area. 

     “Recognising and fostering industry innovation at every level is core to what IBC does, and these awards play a critical role in honouring and encouraging truly ground-breaking work,” said IBC CEO Michael Crimp. “This year’s expanded awards spotlight the fact that there are many areas in which we are seeing the media community collaborate to take us in new, exciting directions. I congratulate this year’s winners for demonstrating the co-operation, imagination and determination needed to really impact our industry.”

    The winners in the five IBC Innovation Awards categories were: 

    Content Creation
    * Olympic Broadcasting Services and partners for live broadcast production with more than 200 smartphones contributing video for the Paris 2024 opening ceremony and a sea-based 5G network for sailing competitions in Marseille.

    Content Distribution
    * The National Hockey League, in partnership with Verizon, AWS, Zixi, Vizrt and Evertz, for producing a 5G and Edge compute framework for assembly, control and delivery of live broadcast.

    Content Everywhere
    * LaLiga for working with Play Anywhere and Ease Live to enable true fan interactivity for itself and its worldwide broadcast and streaming partners.  

    Social Impact
    * Sesame Workshop for its Watch Play Learn Distribution Hub, which allows government agencies and aid organisations to preview and request videos for children in crisis settings.

    Environment & Sustainability 
    * France Télévisions for reducing CO2 emissions by 300 tonnes via a pioneering 100 per cent glass-to-glass cloud production and private 5G network, as it broadcast a 24/7 channel providing coverage of the Olympic torch relay for Paris 2024.

    Also at the 2024 Innovation Awards, this year’s IBC International Honour for Excellence (IHFE) – announced in August – was formally presented to Ukraine’s Mstyslav Chernov for his work as a video journalist and filmmaker. Chernov directed 20 Days in Maripoul, the multi-award-winning documentary chronicling the siege of the city by Russian forces in 2022, when he and his Associated Press (AP) team were among the last journalists there. He previously covered conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh (in Azerbaijan) and the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan after the US withdrawal.
    The Best Technical Paper Award, another pre-announced honour presented at the Innovation Awards, was given to Joshua Maraval, Nicolas Ramin, and Lu Zhang for their paper Advancements in Radiance Field Techniques for Volumetric Video Generation: A Technical Overview. The authors, who are from the Institut de Recherche Technologique,  and the Institut d’Electronique et des Technologies du numéRique, were seeking an efficient solution to the complex problem of capturing and rendering volumetric video for three-dimensional VR experiences.

     

  • Disney Star India shortlisted for IBC2024 Innovation Awards

    Disney Star India shortlisted for IBC2024 Innovation Awards

    MUMBAI: Disney Star India is in the running for this year’s IBC2024 Innovation Awards which are to be held on 15 September at 18 hours. The category for which it has been shortlisted is the social impact award for its work with India Signing Hands through which it brought the IPL 2024 coverage to almost 67 million hard of hearing and 34 million visually impaired fans on Star Sports.

    Late last month, the IBC announced the finalists for the IBC Innovation Awards which celebrate and honour collaborative initiatives leading to ground-breaking solutions that address real-world media, entertainment and technology industry challenges. This year’s awards bring together under one roof IBC’s innovation and social impact awards to create a unified celebration of industry advances, with five categories now being judged: content creation, content distribution, content everywhere, social Impact, and environment & sustainability.

    “This year’s entries once again showcased the global reach and appeal of the IBC Innovation Awards with projects of the highest quality received from six continents,” said chair of the 2024 IBC Innovation Awards jury Fergal Ringrose. “Meanwhile, constantly evolving delivery methods and audience consumption patterns demand that content producers around the globe must innovate dynamically in order to stay relevant and competitive in the modern media and entertainment technology ecosystem. I would like to sincerely thank our panel of judges for their diligence and ability to adapt, as we brought our three content categories together with environment and sustainability and social impact this year for our new-look IBC Innovation Awards.”

    Former news anchor Sasha Qadri is set to host the awards in the auditorium complex at the RAI on Sunday.

    This year’s finalists in the Content Creation category include:

    * The National Football League (US), ESPN, Disney/Pixar and Beyond Sports for creating the first fully animated, real-time NFL alternative broadcast set in the Toy Story universe.

    * Olympic Broadcasting Services and partners for live broadcast production with more than 200 smartphones contributing video for the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony and a sea-based 5G network for sailing competitions in Marseille.

    * Aspire for working with Vislink and FocalPoint VR to develop a virtual reality over RF wireless solution for the inaugural season of Aspire’s Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL).

    The organisations named as finalists in Content Distribution are:

    * Claro for creating a new approach to pay TV in Brazil, integrating streaming channels and applications, delivering entertainment to consumers with a complete pay TV offer.

    * NBCUniversal Operations and Technology for its pioneering project to transform the way its TV channels are delivered to consumers worldwide.

    * The National Hockey League (Canada and US) in partnership with Verizon, AWS, Zixi, Vizrt and Evertz, for producing a 5G and Edge compute framework for assembly, control and delivery of live broadcast.

    The Content Everywhere finalists are:

    * LaLiga for working with Play Anywhere and Ease Live to enable true fan interactivity for itself and its worldwide broadcast and streaming partners.    

    *Red Bull Media House for bringing together real-time GPS tracking, data management and advanced visualisation to transform viewing experience across live broadcast, web widgets and AR mobile app.

    * Franceinfo (France Télévisions) for working with PimpMyCompany to aggregate text/audio/video/photo messages from various platforms and broadcasting them live on air.

    Apart from Disney Star, the  Social Impact finalists are:

    * CultureQ for a new technology platform developed by indigenous-owned tech company Kiwa Digital that enables indigenous peoples globally to revitalise their language and culture at scale, while retaining sovereignty

    * Sesame Workshop for its Watch Play Learn Distribution Hub which allows government agencies and aid organisations to preview and request videos for children in crisis settings.

    The Environment & Sustainability finalists are:

    * France Télévisions for reducing CO2 emissions by 300 tons via a pioneering 100% glass-to-glass cloud production and private 5G network.

    * GreeningofStreaming for addressing growing industry concerns about the energy impact of the streaming sector, with international reach and over 30 member organisations.

    * Anton/Bauer for Salt-E Dog which harnesses the power of sodium chemistry to enable sustainable television production practices.

    The Innovation Awards ceremony will also feature the presentation of the IBC International Honour for Excellence, which goes to an individual or organisation that has made an outstanding impact in the industry, and the best technical paper, with all papers being presented at the 2024 IBC Conference that runs 13-15 September in the auditorium complex of the RAI.

  • CNN wins award at IBC for digital newsgathering

    MUMBAI: The International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) in Amsterdam recently honoured CNN’s digital newsgathering operations with two of its IBC Innovation awards, including a ‘Judges’ Prize’ for the top innovation of the past year.

    CNN’s digital newsgathering also won for Content Creation, an award that cited the network’s use of such an innovation for its coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in July 2006.

    CNN Intl MD Tony Maddox says, “This is an amazing tribute to CNN’s often unsung heroes – our technical and satellite crews – whose ingenuity and tenacity in getting the job done shines through everyday at CNN,” said , managing director for .

    In presenting the awards, IBC judges recognised CNN for opening a new chapter in the use of technology in newsgathering through the use of lightweight kits that combine cameras, editing tools and advanced satellite and Internet communications technology into a laptop-based system. This suite of new technologies enable journalists to employ immediate live and video FTP submissions, real-time content monitoring, editing and voice communication from anywhere in the field.

    Jury chairman for the conference Mike Lumley says, “This is exactly the sort of project that deserves recognition. A major broadcaster had a clear idea of what it wanted to achieve and brought together a team of technical partners to make it happen. In a particularly strong field of entries this year, it was never going to be easy to pick a Judges’ Prize, but this is a most worthy winner.”

    For coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, CNN’s anchors broadcast mainly from various locations in the region using conventional uplink dishes allowing correspondents file live reports in remote areas using portable transmission gear they fit into backpacks. At the height of coverage, CNN had deployed about 90 journalists with programmes such as Anderson Cooper 360°, American Morning, The Situation Room, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and This Week at War all originating from the region. The result of this innovative approach took the story directly to the viewers from multiple angles as it unfolded.