Celebrate
the
Best
Innovation Awards
The IBC Innovation Awards are back!
IBC2026 invites organisations across M&E to submit entries that demonstrate innovation, collaboration and measurable impact.
Unique in the industry, the IBC Innovation Awards honour outstanding collaborative projects across four categories: Content Creation, Content Distribution, Content Everywhere, and Social Impact.
The entries are now open for projects, programmes and initiatives that exemplify breakthrough advances shaping the global media and entertainment (M&E) industry.
The deadline for entries is midnight on Friday, 29 May 2026.
The IBC Innovation Awards, established over 20 years ago, celebrate an industry spirit of co-operation and collaboration.
They are presented to the end user of a project - the broadcaster or media company that started with a requirement and who brought together the technology partners to find an exciting solution. At the same time, those technology partners are also celebrated and honoured for their contribution to a co-operative process which delivered the successful result.
The IBC Innovation Awards are judged by a panel of editors and consultants, drawn from around the industry and around the world.
View 2026 Judging Panel Submit your entry now View the 2025 Awards winners
The Innovation Award categories are:
IBC2025 IHFE Award
The IBC2025 International Honour for Excellence (IHFE) Award, its most prestigious award, goes to world-renowned editor Thelma Schoonmaker, recognising her extraordinary achievements and lifetime contribution to the art and craft of filmmaking, spanning more than five decades and helping shape modern cinema through her close collaboration with Martin Scorsese.
The award was presented in person on Sunday, 14 September on the main stage of the IBC Conference in the RAI Amsterdam.
Earlier in the day at the IBC Conference, Thelma Schoonmaker participated in a Fireside Chat about her life in film, hosted by journalist and author Carolyn Giardina, Consulting Editor of American Cinema Editors’ ‘Cinema Editor’ Magazine.
2025 Best Technical Paper
Alexis Allemann, Sebastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis were awarded the coveted Best Technical Paper at IBC2025 for their work developing an AI Chatbot for Trusted News, underpinned with strict editorial standards and transparency.
The paper is entitled EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration, and addresses the quality, bias and transparency concerns of commercial news chatbots. The result is a database of over 3.5 million articles growing by 3000 news stories per day, and an invaluable tool for both professional journalists and the public to explore the news.
2025 Special Award
IBC recognising Globo, Latin America’s largest media company, with a Special Award for its continued leadership, innovation and support for global media advancement.
In 2025, the group celebrates a century of media leadership in Latin America since the launch of its newspaper O Globo in 1925.
As it looks to the future, Globo reaffirms its commitment to innovation, Brazilian talent, and continuous reinvention.
2025 Project of the Year
The winner of the prestigious 2024 Project of the Year Award for the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme was ‘Evolution of the Control Room’.
Combining two original Accelerator challenge proposals into a wide-ranging project, the Evolution of the Control Room looked to break technical boundaries and pose wider industry questions around live production workflows, architectures and controls.
The project featured two R&D streams: one focussed on the control room looking at XR, AI and voice control, and the other examining modular solutions with HTML-based graphics.
