These are the winners of the IBC Innovation Awards 2025

IBC presents its 2025 Innovation Awards at the RAI Amsterdam, which recognize excellence in five categories related to innovation and social impact, in addition to the IHFE (International Honor for Excellence) awards, Best Technical Article, IBC 2025 Special Award and Accelerator of the Year.

The person in charge of collecting the first prize was Thelma Schoonmaker. Film editing's legendary collaboration with Martin Scorsese over five decades has helped shape the visual language of modern cinema. She is also the only editor to have received nine Oscar nominations, winning three Academy Awards and a BAFTA scholarship.

Schoonmaker thanked "for this wonderful and important award that I will share with Martin Scorsese. We cut his films together, not to mention the incredible material he provides me every time, and he will be delighted to receive this award. It is wonderful for those of us who rack our brains and love making films, and here I am with all the people who will make sure they are projected correctly, loudly and in bright light."

Creation, distribution and social impact

The award for content creation he won it Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth, a documentary that captured the world's first video images of a group of coelacanths in 8K and 22.2 sound. It was produced by NHK Japan, in co-production with ZDF/ARTE and OceanX, in collaboration with CMMAI. Technical support was provided by GOTO Aquatics, SGO y Subtract.

The award for content distribution it was for MediaMesh, of Sky. Sky Group integrated the systems and workflows of broadcasters across Europe to deliver a modular, cloud-native, API-driven platform, in collaboration with AWS, SDVI, Telestream y TMT Insights.

SVT-AV1, developed by Alliance for Open Media, Intel y Meta, won the award Content Everywhere. SVT-AV1 hace viable la transmisión de vídeo en dispositivos móviles de gama baja y redes de bajo ancho de banda, mediante el desarrollo de un modo de decodificación del codificador de software SVT-AV1.

The application Mobile Justice, desarrollada con la American Civil Liberties Union, se llevó a casa el premio Social Impact. La aplicación permite a los ciudadanos documentar los encuentros con las fuerzas del orden en tiempo real y subir pruebas para su revisión. Los socios técnicos son Jotto, Quadrant2 y Wowza.

World First Greening Live Broadcasts: Energy-Efficient UHD Upscaling with NPU for Sustainable IPTV Service fue el ganador del premio a la sustainability. La empresa coreana SK Telecom, along with Pixtree, developed an NPU-based live UHD scaler and integrated it into the live channels of SK Broadband's IPTV (Btv) service, serving 6.7 million subscribers, while achieving an 80% reduction in energy consumption and avoiding the emission of 3,728 tons of CO₂eq per year.

Furthermore, the prize Especial IBC was awarded to Globo, the largest media company in Latin America, for a century of innovation in storytelling, audience connection and digital transformation. Globo currently leads the deployment of television 3.0 in Brazil and is a pioneer in the ethical integration of AI in all its operations.

Alexis Allemann, Sébastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis, of the European Broadcasting Union and the High School of Engineering and Management of the Canton of Vaud, received the award for best technical article for their work titled EBU NEO: a sophisticated multilingual chatbot for exploring a trusted news ecosystem. It addresses the challenge of trustworthy AI-generated news using augmented retrieval generation and a growing database of 3.5 million articles.

Lastly, the award for 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-based solutions that enable remote and collaborative content creation using distributed studios, voice commands, automation and cloud-based graphics. The project was driven by an exceptional consortium of leaders from the media and academic institutions: ITN, BBC, TV2 Denmark, YLE, EBU, Channel 4, Shannon University of Technology (TUS)/Transmixr, Trinity College Dublin, HSLU University Lucerne, Switzerland, Al Jazeera Media Networks, XReco, Vodafone Group and SVT. Among the participants in the project were Tinkerlist, Nxt Edition, Loopic, SPX Graphics, Cuepilot y Erizos.TV.