Join the Innovation Revolution with IBC’s 2026 Accelerator Programme
The 2026 Accelerator Projects are here!
The 9 IBC2026 Accelerator Media Innovation Programme Projects are bringing together organisations from across broadcast, streaming, live events and media tech to explore emerging innovations that reshape the way content is created, distributed and experienced.
Selected from the pitches by leading global media organisations at the 2026 Accelerator Kickstart Day, this year’s Accelerator programme sees media organisations, which include BBC, NBCUniversal, DAZN, ITV, Channel 4, Associated Press, Sky and Al Jazeera, collaborating with technology providers on a new generation of projects.
2026 Accelerator Projects
Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice: This project is using open 5G network APIs to dynamically prioritise broadcast devices, ensuring reliable high-quality wireless video feeds in congested environments.
FRAMES: Federated Retrieval, Agentic Media Environment and Software (Defined Workflows): The FRAMES Accelerator challenge aims to connect broadcaster archives, creative teams, and AI agents to accelerate pre-production through intelligent content discovery and multimodal AI collaboration.
Q-Stream: Quantum Secure, Network-Adaptive, Verifiable, Live Media Infrastructure: Q-Stream is a proof-of-concept system that uses predictive AI orchestration, semantic video compression, and hybrid quantum-secure authentication to maintain trusted live broadcasts in severely bandwidth-limited or contested network environments.
VooPla: The Decision Twin - Decision-Ready Sustainable Digital Twins for Broadcast & Virtual Production Studios: VooPla explores how production-accurate digital twins of broadcast and virtual production studios can help commissioners and production teams evaluate technical feasibility, costs, and sustainability impacts earlier in the production process.
2026 Accelerator Projects
From Broadcast to Me-Cast: New Sports Engagement via Agentic Workflows: This project explores an AI-native platform that uses agentic AI to automate live media workflows, enabling real-time personalization, content adaptation, and new monetization opportunities for sports and other live broadcasts.
Crystal Clear: Boosting Speech Intelligibility in Media: This project develops and pilots a metric for measuring dialogue intelligibility in audiovisual content, integrating it into broadcast production workflows to detect accessibility issues and demonstrate its use across real technical environments.
Delta Protocol: Live Media Reinvented: Delta Protocol transforms live streaming by reinventing the transmission layer of live media. It shifts from frame‑based delivery to a semantic model that understands which moments matter. Only meaningful event updates are sent, with the rest intelligently reconstructed at the destination. This enables hyper‑personalised, immersive and adaptive experiences at massive scale. Using AI to shift personalisation from duplication to composition, it unlocks new creative, operational and efficiency gains.
IFeL: Immersive Festival Live - Remote Presence at Scale: This ambitious project prototypes an end-to-end workflow for immersive live streaming from music festivals, combining multi-perspective video, viewpoint-aware spatial audio, and interactive audience participation.
2026 Accelerator Incubator
IBC Incubator 2026: SMART STORIES: The Agentic Production Ecosystem:
Inspired by the multi-award-winning success of earlier Accelerators, this new consortium aims to define an open standard for story context interoperability in live production, spanning the full content chain from news gathering through to distribution.
2026 Kickstart Day
The IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme’s Kickstart Day 2026 took place on Wednesday, 25th of February at the BBC Broadcasting House, London.
Aside from industry-leading speaker & panel sessions on compelling challenges and opportunities for the sector, the highlight was a series of Quickfire Pitches by the 12 shortlisted Accelerator Project Challenges.
The event also included networking drinks and the 2025 Accelerator Project of the Year Award, awarded to the 'AI Agent Assistants for Live Production' Team.
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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
2025 Accelerator Media Innovation Projects
This truly international Accelerator’s project goals aligned to develop a practical framework that leveraged an orchestrator of Generative AI tools to enable broadcasters and creative teams to produce high quality, photorealistic video content, incorporating narrative, artistic, ethics and compositional elements into emotionally impactful content.
AI Agent Assistants for Live Production envisions AI-driven production assistants that seamlessly integrate into control room workflows, enhancing live production with intelligent automation.
Ultra-Low Latency Live Streaming at Scale builds on the foundation of the previous Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports accelerator, focusing on the development of a truly scalable architecture for delivering live TV over the internet.
Stamping Your Content (C2PA Provenance) aims to develop open-source tools that enable organizations to integrate Content Credentials (C2PA) into their workflows, allowing them to sign and verify media provenance.
Private 5G, Conquering the Air(waves) explores the deployment of private 5G network cells on drones to enhance live broadcast production by providing wireless connectivity for video, audio, and sensor data.
Master Control Cloud proposes the development of a cloud-based routing and monitoring system for live media streams, enabling seamless acquisition, transport, and oversight entirely within the cloud.
Building on the foundation of the 2024 project,
ECOFLOW II shifts focus to overcome the challenge of limited data access and engagement.
Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange explores a new approach to Live Media Exchange, leveraging high-speed interconnect technologies originally developed for high-performance computing and now widely used in cloud data centers.
2025 Special Incubator Project
Changing the Game ... Again
Graduated from the success from the 2024 Accelerator “AI Media Production Labs”, IBC’s brand-new Incubator cranks it up a gear with a working POC test bed that will aim to develop personalized highlight reels and real-time sports data tailored to each fan based on their preferences and interactions.
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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.”