Innovation Awards: Collaboration and open standards triumph

The ceremony opened with the presentation of the International Honour for Excellence (IHFE), IBC's most prestigious award, to Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recognising the company's decades of innovation in live Olympic 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, AI, cloud-based technologies, and next-generation storytelling, OBS has transformed how audiences around the world experience the Olympic Games. 

When accepting the award, Yiannis Exarchos, CEO, OBS, said: "It’s obvious that everyone in this room knows very well what it is to, on the one hand, be burning with ambition to do something very creative, big, and unique… and on the other hand, not to be sleeping and not to know if it’s the right choice, the right application of resources, and the most efficient and responsible way. Essentially, living day in and day out, the dilemma that is creativity… It’s sometimes extremely stressful. This is why I’d like to thank you, on behalf of the whole OBS team, for recognising what it takes for us to deliver what we are doing and push ourselves further and further, with your support… For us, it’s very rewarding to see that we have had the right kind of worries; it’s as big as any number of the delivery of the Games"

Winners were also named across four Innovation Award categories, alongside recipients of the Best Technical Paper and the IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2025. 

The Content Creation award went to Media eXchange Layer (MXL), an open-source initiative established by the European Broadcasting Union with the North American Broadcasters Association, hosted by the Linux Foundation and deployed by CBC/Radio-Canada, with contributions from a wide range of industry partners. 

Content Distribution was won by Reuters for ‘capacity that follows the live news story’, which replaced fixed-capacity infrastructure with a Global Shared Memory ecosystem powered by TVU Networks' MediaMesh, enabling event-driven, API-orchestrated news distribution. Partners included InSync, Kinetiq, Sony, Elecard and TAG Video Systems. 

Globo won the Content Everywhere award for ‘Implementation of DTV+ in Brazil’, which combines the reach of free-to-air television with the personalisation and measurability of digital media, reconnecting mass audiences with digital capabilities through collaboration across government, broadcasters and industry. 

The Social Impact award went to G&L Systemhaus for ‘Closing the sign language gap’, which brought together AI company Signapse, software company Norsk/id3as and CDN provider Akamai to build a broadcast-grade, AI-powered sign language solution for live and on-demand streaming. 

The Best Technical Paper award went to Emma Maier, Jodie Pearton, Anna Stewart, Arina Mnatsakanyan and Jonathan Freeman of i2 media research, for their paper on reducing interaction barriers for older viewers using an age-informed overlay interface. 

The 2025 Accelerator Project of the Year, ‘AI Agent Assistants for Live Production’, was also presented, championed by ITN, BBC and Channel 4 with vendors including CUEZ, Amira Labs and EVS. 

Fergal Ringrose, Chair of the Innovation Awards Jury, said: “Our 2026 IBC Innovation Awards winners share a common thread in breaking down previously insurmountable geographical, language, and organisational barriers to open media workflows. Each winner realises a transformational environment for collaborative, cloud-native, software-first digital ecosystems.”