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Accelerator Innovation Programme
Join the Innovation Revolution with IBC’s Accelerator Programme
The 2027 Call is now Open!
The Call for Challenge submissions for the 2027 Accelerator Media Innovation Programme is now open!
Entering its ninth year, IBC’s Accelerator Programme has become a unique focal point for developing fast-track solutions to common industry challenges and sharing learnings across the global media sector.
We are inviting organisations from across the global media and entertainment industry to propose ambitious, collaborative innovation projects that address real-world business and technology needs and turn bold ideas into practical industry advances.
The deadline for Challenge submissions is Friday, 11 December.
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Designed to unite global media leaders and pioneering tech partners, the IBC Accelerator Programme delivers an agile innovation framework focused on fast-tracking real-world, deployable solutions to industry-critical challenges.
The 2027 programme will build on the momentum of this year's Accelerators, which brought together leading media organisations as Champions, including Al Jazeera, BBC, DAZN, ITV, NBCUniversal, RTL and Sky, among many others, alongside Participants such as Google Cloud, EVS, AWS, Moments Lab, Shure, TCS, AMD-HP and many more to explore opportunities for innovation across the media sector.
The projects showcased at IBC2026 spanned agentic AI and intelligent production workflows, next-generation streaming and connectivity, immersive live experiences, content accessibility, and new approaches to media infrastructure and interoperability.
2027 Kickstart Day
The IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme’s Kickstart Day 2027 will take place on Thursday, 18 March at the BBC Broadcasting House, London.
For 2027, we are introducing a streamlined selection approach, with nine Accelerator projects to be chosen ahead of the event. The selected projects will be presented at Kickstart Day, where project leaders will pitch their challenges and invite organisations to participate.
Following the event, project teams will work together to develop solutions, culminating in live proof of concept (PoC) demonstrations and presentations at IBC2027 in Amsterdam 10-13 September next year.
Full background information on the IBC Accelerators can be found here:
Accelerator Sponsorship Pack Accelerator FAQs IBC Accelerator Overview Deck Accelerator Marketing Pack
2026 Accelerator Media Innovation Projects
Network Control ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
AI for Live Sports ...
AI for Live Sports and Beyond: Rewiring live media via Agentic AI Orchestration and “meCast”: 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 ...
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 ...
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. This enables hyper‑personalised, immersive and adaptive experiences at massive scale.
2026 Accelerator Incubator
INCUBATOR: Smart Stories - The New Knowledge Architecture for Content Production:
Inspired by the multi-award-winning success of earlier Accelerators, this new consortium defined an open standard for story context interoperability in live production, spanning the full content chain from news gathering through to distribution.
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“The IBC Accelerator Programme is the glue that brings together technology leaders to revolutionise, redefine, and reimagine what the future of media will look like. It’s made possible because of this programme.”
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“The programme is critical for driving digital and AI transformation within the media & entertainment ecosystem by bringing together multi organisation project-based approach.”
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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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"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 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.”
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