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Innovation Awards
The 2026 Winners are here!
Witness the 2026 Innovation Awards at IBC2026
Each year, IBC 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.
“Our 2026 IBC Innovation Awards winners share a common thread in breaking down previously insurmountable geographical, language, and organisational barriers to open media workflows,” said Fergal Ringrose, Chair of the Innovation Awards Jury. Read press release
2026 Innovation Awards
IBC has unveiled the winners of the prestigious IBC2026 Innovation Awards at an event held at the RAI Amsterdam on Sunday 13 September, honouring collaborative projects that tackle longstanding challenges and advance the global media, entertainment and technology industry.
The awards recognise projects bringing organisations and technology partners together to address some of the media industry’s most significant challenges, with this year’s winners spanning open-source media workflows, live news distribution, the convergence of broadcast and broadband, and AI-powered accessibility.
IBC2026 IHFE Award
The IBC2026 International Honour for Excellence (IHFE) Award, its most prestigious award, goes to Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recognising the company’s decades of innovation in live sports production and its far-reaching impact on the global broadcast industry.
Through pioneering developments in ultra-high-definition production, immersive audio, remote production workflows, artificial intelligence, cloud-based technologies and next-generation storytelling, OBS has transformed the way audiences around the world experience the Olympic Games.
The award will be presented in person on Sunday, 13 September as part of the IBC Awards.
2026 Best Technical Paper
Emma Maier, Jodie Pearton, Anna Stewart, Arina Mnatsakanyan and Jonathan Freeman, of i2 media research, are being awarded the coveted Best Technical Paper at IBC2026 for their work entitled Measuring and reducing interaction barriers in internet-delivered TV systems through age-informed human factors design.
The paper explores how internet-delivered TV can be made easier for older viewers so they can access everyday services with confidence. It then demonstrates how a simple, optional age-informed overlay interface can reduce barriers and support more confident, independent viewing.
2025 Project of the Year
The winner of the prestigious 2025 Project of the Year Award for the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme was ‘AI Agent Assistants for Live Production'.
The project demonstrated an AI Assistant Director acting as an orchestrator of a suite of production agents, enabling simpler voice control and natural language coordination of complex control room workflows. The project also developed an open, vendor-agnostic framework for AI agents working across live production, with an emphasis on augmenting human decision-making while maintaining editorial control. It was Championed by broadcasters ITN, BBC and Channel 4, with Participant vendors CUEZ, Amira Labs, Highfield AI, Monks, CuePilot, Shure, EVS, Moments Lab and Google Cloud.
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 the 2026 finalists View the 2026 nominations 2026 Judging Panel
The Innovation Award categories are:
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"These awards matter because they recognise cutting edge technological innovation that has moved beyond experimentation and into real world industry use."
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"The IBC Awards provide sought-after industry recognition for the immense efforts put into developing cutting-edge solutions, but also the dedication and collaboration bringing them to fruition."