Join the Innovation Revolution with IBC’s 2025 Accelerator Programme
Calling for Media Industry Challenges Now!
IBC is delighted to announce the official call for challenges for the Accelerator Media Innovation Programme for 2025.
The deadline for submissions is now extended to 8 January, 2025.
The Accelerator Programme is IBC’s core innovation track that brings together buyers (Champions) and sellers (Participants) of Media & Entertainment technology to work collaboratively in fast-track, solution-focused innovation projects.
For 2025, IBC is seeking challenges that address pressing issues in content creation, live production and distribution, audience engagement and technology integration, intelligent automation, sustainability, innovative ad-tech, connectivity and many other areas of emerging media R&D.
The cycle begins with this call for Challenges, from which IBC then assesses submissions and twelve are selected to go forward for pitching at our special IBC Accelerator Kickstart Day event.
Join us on Wednesday 12th of February at the BBC Broadcasting House, London for the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme’s annual Kickstart Day 2025, a full-day event focusing on media industry innovation, with an international audience of media & entertainment technology professionals and leaders.
Aside from industry-leading speaker & panel sessions on compelling challenges and opportunities for the sector, the highlight will be a series of Quickfire Pitches by the 12 shortlisted Accelerator Project Challenges vying to be part of the final eight selected for development in 2025.
More than 300 organisations have taken part in the programme since its foundation in 2019, as Champions and Participants in some 44+ projects – household media brands come together with large, medium and small technology organisations and academic institutions.
Champions of projects have included Aardman Entertainment, Al Jazeera, BBC, BT Sport, DAZN, Fox Sports, ITV, NBC Universal, the English Premier League, Pixar, Production Park, Thomson Reuters, RTÉ, Sky, Universal Pictures, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and many, many more.
Projects have addressed a seam of critical industry challenges in areas such as 5G, AI, CG Animation, Live Cloud Production, Immersive audio & sound, News Disinformation, Next Gen News Studio, Cloud Localization, Sustainability, Volumetric video and VFX workflows, IP Workflows and many others...
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Full background information on the IBC Accelerators can be found here:
Accelerator Sponsorship Pack Accelerator FAQs IBC Accelerator Overview Deck Accelerator Marketing Pack
Accelerator Media Innovation Programme 2024
2024 Accelerator Media Innovation Projects
ECOFLOW: Energy-Conserving Optimization for Future-ready, Low-impact Online Workflows tackles the environmental impact of media consumption by developing consolidated metrics for energy consumption at major steps of the end-to-end technology supply chain, best-of-breed energy-saving features into a unified user experience.
IP Networks: Finding the Needle in the Haystack gathers data from across the industry to establish current obstacles within this field. Utilising the data gathered, test and implementation of solutions incorporating IS-13 and dynamic routing for orchestrated infrastructure then took place.
Connecting Live Performances of the Future with ULL-AVLM (Ultra-Low Latency Audio, Video, Light and Media Data) also aimed to recreate the experience of a live performance in multiple locations or bring together remote performers into a seamless and immersive live experience.
Design Your Weapons in the Fight Against Disinformation developed an industry-wide understanding on the challenges and abuses being faced today by all media outlets in identifying disinformation and helping audiences identify trustworthy news and information.
Evolution of the Control Room - Leveraging XR, Voice, AI & HTML-Based Graphics Solutions combined two original Accelerator Challenges into a transformative overarching project exploring the evolution of live production workflows – with two key streams of development.
Digital Replicas and Talent ID: Provenance, Verification and New Automated Workflows addressed the evolving disruption within the Media & Entertainment industry in the authentication and management of talent in today's digital landscape.
The aim of the
Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports was to achieve Twitter/X-equivalent latency and a near-instant playback start using standard existing HTTP streaming technical stack and infrastructure.
An IBC Accelerators first, the 2024 Programme featured a very special Challenge under an umbrella theme of ‘AI Media Production Lab’, which set out to explore a series of specific AI concepts in various guises of production.
2024 Special Incubator Project
Connect and Produce Anywhere - Phase II
Following the build and development of an all IP, Edge-first, multi-cloud, multi software test bed environment in the CAPA Accelerator 2023, the project team for 2024 aimed to implement and road test the solution on some real-world live event production scenarios where there are varying degrees of available bandwidth.
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Accelerator Media Innovation Programme 2023
IBC365: Accelerating Innovation Podcast
Get ready to ignite your curiosity with IBC 365’s exciting weekly mini podcast series, “Accelerating Innovation”, where some of the sharpest minds in media and entertainment reveal their thinking and approach to innovation. Broadcaster and presenter Omar Mehtab will guide you through the fascinating world of innovation, exploring groundbreaking advancements and decoding the complexities of modern technology.
Available on Spotify, Podcast Index, Podcast Addict, Deezer, Apple Podcast, and Amazon Music/ Audible.
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"It’s a brilliant opportunity to meet like-minded people working in some of the biggest tech companies, other broadcasters, universities and researchers to bring us all together into one collaborative approach to solving the problems we’re all facing.”
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“The IBC Accelerator programme is breaking boundaries. This is my first time here and I have already spoken to a lot of international media companies, which I wouldn’t have easily met if I wasn’t here. It’s a great space for co-creation.”
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“The challenge of real-world networking in recent times makes IBC Accelerators even more important for the industry. It provides a unique space to engage and collaborate with established peers and exciting new companies. Building these relationships is crucial for the BBC to remain relevant.”
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“The Accelerator programme offers an amazing opportunity to collaborate with incredible people across the industry; I had the opportunity to build relationships with senior people. It's a truly collaborative environment, where we can innovate, tackle business problems, and succeed together.”
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“Collaborating with new contacts, diverse vendors, even former industry rivals – we tackled joint challenges head-on. We built a great foundation, and this year's pitch promises an exciting six-month sprint.”
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“The Accelerators program brings people together; it allows us to make a commitment to a focal point and address some clear deliverables around that. For me, IBC helps to bring all participants around the table.”
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“The Accelerator Media Innovation Programme really sets the scene for IBC and gets the excitement going in the lead up to the show.”
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“The true value lies in bringing together those facing challenges with those who can solve them, all in an open and collaborative environment. The Accelerators are a powerful driver of this collaboration, which ultimately showcases the capabilities of our industry as a whole.”
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"The Accelerators program is fantastic because it fosters collaboration among public broadcasters. Sharing common goals and challenges, we realise we're not alone.”
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"The rise of disinformation - fake news and deepfakes - is a real worry. How can we be sure what's real anymore? At IBC, The Accelerators share different techniques and perspectives and that’s key, it’s what we are interested in.”
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“It’s such an amazing group of people; everybody is interested in the future of media and technology. To bring together the collaboration and ideas is just an incredible place to be and really important with where we are right now in our industry."
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“We love the energy, creativity, collaboration and the ideas that came out from the Accelerator’s programme.”
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“The rise of misinformation and deepfakes threatens media, democracy, and trust in information. What’s special about the Accelerators programme is its holistic approach in bringing together the different parts of the chain to help tackle this problem.”