The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has named Swedish public broadcaster SVT as the winner of its Technology & Innovation Award 2026.
SVT's platform, called Neo, is a fully software-based production system that ran 10 parallel production environments and OTT channels during the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The live production system is built entirely on standard IT hardware rather than dedicated broadcast equipment. It combines IP-based transport, cloud-native principles and modular production services.
At the 2026 Winter Olympics, Neo delivered more than 800 hours and over 150 sports productions across 10 simultaneous production environments and OTT channels.
The award runners up were named as CBC/Radio-Canada for its Dynamic Streaming tool and France Télévisions for Alix, a multi-cloud, open-source platform that brings IT and media workflows onto a single Kubernetes foundation.
Meanwhile, Delphine Roussel-Galle, an AI engineer at France Télévisions, won the EBU’s 2026 Young Technology Talent Award.
Since 2024 she has designed and led several production-grade data and AI projects at the broadcaster, progressing from individual work to leading a small engineering team. Her work applies AI to practical newsroom and editorial tools.
Both awards are decided annually by the EBU Technical Committee, through individual confidential scoring by each of its members. The 2026 pool contained 13 nominations for the main award.
"SVT's Neo platform is an outstanding demonstration of what a full commitment to software-defined production can achieve," said Michael Eberhard, CTO of public media organization SWR/ARD and outgoing Chair of the EBU Technical Committee. "Delivering the Winter Olympics on standard IT infrastructure, at this scale and with this reliability, is a great result. It sets a benchmark for the industry and offers a practical model for any public broadcaster."
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