Innovation Awards: Stories behind Content Everywhere finalists

IBC recently unveiled the finalists for the 2026 Innovation Awards across four categories – Content Creation, Content Distribution, Social Impact, and Content Everywhere. Ringrose shines a light on the outstanding innovation demonstrated by these projects and why these technological projects will feature prominently in the IBC Innovation Awards presentation next week in Amsterdam.

Implementation of DTV+ in Brazil  

Through DTV+, Globo has combined the reach of free-to-air television with the personalisation and measurability of digital media. By integrating broadcast and broadband, it reconnects mass audiences with digital capabilities. The project involved collaboration across government, broadcasters, and industry.  

Technical supporters named in the project entry, in alphabetical order, include: Advansat, Aeromax, Amlogic, ANATEL, Antop, Aquário, Ateme, Century, Cleverlogic, Dielectric, Digicap, EITV, Enensys, Fórum SBTVD, Fraunhofer IIS, Harmonic, Hengli, Hisense, Intelbras, Jiuzhou, Kathrein, LG, Linear Denki, MainConcept, MediaTek, Mirakulo, MOPA, Multi, PRO Eletronic, Realtek, Rohde & Schwarz, Samsung, SEI Robotics, Syes, Skyworth, Sony, Spinner, Synamedia, TCL, Triveni, Vivensis, V-Nova, and ZTE.  

Free-to-air television remains the leading video platform in Brazil, accounting for a 64.4% share of attention. It is repositioned to address shifts in consumption, enabling personalisation, interactive experiences, audience targeting, and census-level measurement. Globo prepared for the launch of DTV+, transforming free-to-air TV into an always-on experience that unifies broadcast and broadband, with free-to-air services prominently positioned on TV home screens.  

It delivers 4K, immersive audio, dynamic ad insertion (DAI), and T-commerce, reaching 80% of households in São Paulo (15.3 million), 65% in Rio de Janeiro (7.4 million), and 40% in Brasília (1 million), scaling towards 100 million devices installed and serving as a blueprint for the Americas.  

In recent years, free-to-air television in Brazil has undergone a structural transformation, driven by shifts in audience behaviour, attention, and advertising revenues towards digital environments. During this period, internet consumption through TV increased from 13% to 60% of households, while advertising investments moved toward connected TV platforms.  

This created a central challenge: how to increase the reach and social impact of free-to-air TV while enabling it to compete in the digital economy.  

In response, the project was conceived to reconnect the scale of broadcast with digital capabilities, combining mass reach with personalisation and measurement. Globo structured DTV+ as part of a multi-stakeholder effort involving government, broadcasters, and industry, establishing a shared vision for the evolution of free-to-air TV in Brazil, including a coordinated approach to ensure free-to-air services gain visibility on TV home screens through dedicated applications and persistent entry points.  

The project introduced DTV+ Next Gen TV, Brazil’s tailored ATSC 3.0 variant, as an end-to-end architecture rather than an incremental upgrade. The transmission stack combines codecs (VVC, LCEVC, MPEG-H immersive audio) with MIMO for higher spectral and energy efficiency, dual CDN distribution (OTA + OTT), and an experience management system (EMS) that synchronises broadcast and digital experiences.  

The connected fan experience  

Built with Microsoft, the Premier League Companion powered by Copilot reimagines fan engagement at global scale, connecting 1.8 billion fans in 189 countries to 30 seasons of Premier League content through personalised, real-time AI conversational experiences. The technical partner is Beyond Sport.  

The Premier League’s audience is everywhere. It is in a sports bar in Lagos, a flat in Mumbai, a stadium concourse in Manchester, and a commuter train in São Paulo. The league is being watched on phones, tablets, laptops, smart TVs, and stadium screens. It engages fans before, during and after every match, in dozens of languages, across multiple platforms.    

At the heart of this experience is the Premier League Companion by Copilot – an AI-powered feature within the league’s app and website, built with Microsoft, the Official Cloud and AI Partner of the Premier League. Powered by Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Cosmos DB, and a multi-agent architecture, the Companion plays a central role in the Premier League’s ambition to become the most digitally connected league in the world.   

The Premier League’s goal was to give every fan, on every device, a personalised real-time experience: live match updates tailored to their club; editorial content surfaced from a vast archive; intuitive natural-language interactions; and contextual prompts that adapt to whether the fan is preparing for kick-off, watching the action or reflecting after the final whistle.   

Agentic AI is most often discussed in enterprise contexts. The Premier League Companion is an example of a consumer-facing, multi-agent system serving tens of millions of fans in production, with full traceability of how each response was generated.   

Context-aware prompts adapt across pre-, in-, and post-game moments, while agentic AI surfaces what matters most to each fan. Engagement on the Premier League app and website is up 20% year over year, with 60 million participants and 750,000 interactions in the first six months.  

The Companion is the product of close collaboration between the Premier League’s teams in digital products and technology, audience development, editorial, and branding, as well as Microsoft’s engineering, AI, and customer-success organisations. Adobe also contributed the customer data platform (CDP) layer hosted on Azure.  

Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Search, Semantic Kernel, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Managed Redis were combined and tuned to the Premier League’s editorial voice, fan data model, and brand requirements. The Microsoft and the Premier League team worked together to encode editorial guidelines into prompts, integrate vertical video, and build the agentic plug-in framework that powers context-aware responses.   

Tilly Norwood (and the Tillyverse)  

Created by Particle6, with its talent studio Xicoia, the AI-generated performer has reached an estimated 80 million people globally with approximately 500 million cumulative impressions.  

Xicoia spent close to six months developing her – working across a carefully selected suite of AI tools – with ChatGPT applied to creative tasks, DeepSeek to numerical processing, and Perplexity and Gemini among those used for research and iteration – alongside a range of visual generation platforms to develop her appearance across thousands of individual refinements.   

A team of 15 people were involved throughout, moving through over 2,000 iterations of her appearance alone – through versions that were too polished, too airbrushed, or lacking in authenticity – before arriving at the specific quality they were pursuing: a photorealistic, girl-next-door character with genuine screen presence, built entirely from original creative decisions with no reference to any existing person's likeness.  

The innovation lies in the orchestration of tools rather than any single application, and in the human creative direction applied throughout – with every stage shaped by filmmakers, designers, writers, and producers working in combination with AI to achieve results neither could produce independently.  

Tilly's screen debut came with AI Commissioner, a short comedy sketch released on YouTube in July 2025, in which she functioned as lead performer – delivering scripted dialogue, comic timing, and consistent character identity across the piece. The sketch accumulated over one million views on Instagram, 650K on YouTube, and triggered immediate international press coverage. Simultaneously, Tilly established a constant presence on Instagram – posting AI-generated content in character, engaging with followers, and sustaining a public persona.  

What is particularly notable is that Tilly's multi-platform presence is not simply a distribution strategy – it is the product itself. Each platform serves a distinct function within her overall presence: YouTube debuts her major releases; Instagram sustains her day-to-day public identity; the live industry circuit, including her appearance at the Zurich Film Festival Summit in September 2025, extended her reach into professional and institutional audiences.  

In March 2026, Particle6 released “Take the Lead” – a music video timed to coincide with the Academy Awards and the first public glimpse of the Tillyverse. Produced by a team of 18 people, the piece used performance capture combined with AI post-production – a development in technique from AI Commissioner. The video was then covered across The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Variety, Broadcast, and beyond.  

It introduced the Tillyverse explicitly: a dynamic, constantly evolving digital universe where AI characters live, interact, and build careers across platforms, formats, and territories.  

The winners of the IBC2026 Innovation Awards will be announced on Sunday 13 September at 18:00 CEST on the main stage of the IBC Conference at the RAI Amsterdam.  

The IBC2026 Awards presentation will also feature the IBC International Honour for Excellence, recognising an outstanding contribution to the global media industry, along with the Best Technical Paper, selected from the peer-reviewed papers represented during the IBC2026 Conference.  

Learn more about the IBC Innovation Awards at: https://show.ibc.org/ibc-awards