AMSTERDAM—IBC unveiled the winners of the prestigious IBC2026 Innovation Awards at an event held at the RAI Amsterdam on Sunday 13 September.
During the event, previously announced recipients of IBC2026’s International Honor for Excellence, Best Technical Paper and IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2025 were also presented with their awards
The Innovation Awards celebrate collaborative, real-world breakthroughs across four categories – Content Creation, Content Distribution, Content Everywhere and Social Impact.
The awards recognize projects bringing organizations 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.
“Our 2026 IBC Innovation Awards winners share a common thread in breaking down previously insurmountable geographical, language, and organizational barriers to open media workflows,” said Fergal Ringrose, Chair of the Innovation Awards Jury. “Each winner realizes 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 personalization 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 Honor for Excellence (IHFE). This year’s IHFE was awarded to Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recognizing 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.
