IBC2025 Innovation Awards Winners

This year’s IHFE was awarded to Thelma Schoonmaker, the legendary film editor whose collaboration with Martin Scorsese over five decades has helped shape the visual language of modern cinema. Schoonmaker is the only editor to receive nine Oscar nominations, winning three Academy Awards and a BAFTA Fellowship.

The award for Best Technical Paper was given to Alexis Allemann, Sébastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis, from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and la Haute École d'Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD), for their paper titled EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration. The paper tackles the challenge of trusted AI-generated news using Retrieval Augmented Generation and a growing 3.5 million-article database.

The IBC Special Award was presented to Globo, Latin America’s largest media company, for a century of innovation in storytelling, audience connection, and digital transformation. Globo is currently leading Brazil’s TV 3.0 rollout and pioneering ethical AI integration across its operations.

The Accelerator Project of the Year was awarded to Evolution of the Control Room – Leveraging XR, Voice, AI & HTML-Based Graphics Solutions. This transformative project reimagined live production workflows by developing XR- and AI-powered solutions that enable remote and collaborative content creation using distributed studios, voice commands, automation, and cloud-based graphics. The project was championed by an exceptional consortium of media leaders and academic institutions: ITN, BBC, TV2 Denmark, YLE, EBU, Channel 4, Technological University of the Shannon (TUS)/TRANSMIXR, Trinity College Dublin, HSLU Lucerne University, Switzerland, Al Jazeera Media Networks, XReco, Vodafone Group, and SVT. Project participants included Tinkerlist, Nxt Edition, Loopic, SPX Graphics, Cuepilot, and Erizos.TV.