IBC announces shortlisted 2026 Accelerator projects

Selected from pitches at the 2026 Accelerator Kickstart Day at BBC Broadcasting House, this year’s Accelerator programme sees media organisations, which include BBC, NBCUniversal, DAZN, ITV, Channel 4, Associated Press, Sky and Al Jazeera, collaborating with technology providers on a new generation of projects. Now in its eighth year, the Accelerator Programme has become a focal point for collaboration across the industry, providing a framework for fast-tracking hands-on projects that address real-world industry needs.

“The Accelerator Programme provides a unique sandbox for collaborative innovation, bringing the industry together to solve complex challenges in an open and trusted environment,” said Mark Smith, Lead, IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme. “Each year, we see ideas rapidly evolve into practical solutions, with teams working together in ways that simply aren’t possible in day-to-day operations.”

AMD-HP and Shure have been announced as Associate Sponsors of the Accelerator Programme, while EIT Culture & Creativity, supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), was unveiled at the Kickstart event as IBC’s Innovation Partner for 2026 – reinforcing its role as a catalyst for innovation across the global media ecosystem.

Industry participants highlighted the value of the programme in accelerating innovation through collaboration. Sandeep Tiku, Chief Technology Officer at DAZN, said when it comes to industry advances in areas such as streaming: “The Accelerator Programme is actually becoming the glue that brings hardware, software, and technology experts together to revolutionise, redefine, and reimagine what streaming will look like – It's only possible because of this programme.”

Alex Bassett, Vice President, Innovation at NBCUniversal, noted that fragmented news workflows are a pressing industry challenge that the incubator project aims to address, saying: “Story centric has been a concept that's been thrown around specifically in news for a really long time, but it's been very hard to execute. We’re not building a proof of concept or a demo – we're trying to ship something that's almost a minimum viable product that could be then adopted.”

The projects selected for 2026 will now enter a six-month development phase, during which project teams are formed and solutions rapidly developed in a collaborative, cross-industry environment – culminating in live Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrations in the Accelerator Zone at IBC2026 (11–14 September).

The 2026 Accelerator and Incubator projects are:

Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice – Proposed by GSMA Fusion, BBC, EBU (including 5G MAG & 5G EMERGE consortia), France Télévisions, RAI (CRITS), University of Strathclyde, with supporting Participant Neutral Wireless: This project is using open 5G network APIs to dynamically prioritise broadcast devices, ensuring reliable high-quality wireless video feeds in congested environments.

FRAMES: Federated Retrieval, Agentic Media Environment and Software (Defined Workflows) – Proposed by RAI, EBU, MovieLabs with Co-Champions ITV, ETC (Entertainment Technology Center) USC (University of Southern California), XRBB (Extended Reality Berlin-Brandenburg)` and supporting Participants AMD-HP and Holli: The FRAMES Accelerator challenge aims to connect broadcaster archives, creative teams, and AI agents to accelerate pre-production through intelligent content discovery and multimodal AI collaboration.

Q-Stream: Quantum Secure, Network-Adaptive, Verifiable, Live Media Infrastructure – Proposed by IET, BFBS, with supporting Participants Tesla Technologies: Q-Stream is a proof-of-concept system that uses predictive AI orchestration, semantic video compression, and hybrid quantum-secure authentication to maintain trusted live broadcasts in severely bandwidth-limited or contested network environments.

VooPla: The Decision Twin - Decision-Ready Sustainable Digital Twins for Broadcast & Virtual Production Studios – Proposed by Digital Catapult, with supporting Participants Solve Evolve and Heliguy: VooPla explores how production-accurate digital twins of broadcast and virtual production studios can help commissioners and production teams evaluate technical feasibility, costs, and sustainability impacts earlier in the production process.

From Broadcast to Me-Cast: New Sports Engagement via Agentic Workflows – Proposed by Astro Malaysia, MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Company), with supporting Participants TCS (Tata Consultancy Services): This project explores an AI-native platform that uses agentic AI to automate live media workflows, enabling real-time personalization, content adaptation, and new monetization opportunities for sports and other live broadcasts.

Crystal Clear: Boosting Speech Intelligibility in Media – Proposed by Channel 4 and BBC: This project develops and pilots a metric for measuring dialogue intelligibility in audiovisual content, integrating it into broadcast production workflows to detect accessibility issues and demonstrate its use across real technical environments.

Delta Protocol: Live Media Reinvented – Proposed by DAZN: Delta Protocol transforms live streaming by reinventing the transmission layer of live media. It shifts from frame-based delivery to a semantic model that understands which moments matter. Only meaningful event updates are sent, with the rest intelligently reconstructed at the destination. This enables hyper personalised, immersive and adaptive experiences at massive scale. Using AI to shift personalisation from duplication to composition, it unlocks new creative, operational and efficiency gains.

IFeL: Immersive Festival Live - Remote Presence at Scale – Proposed by SMPTE, MIT Reality Hack, with Co-Champions Kings College London, University of Galway, University of Southampton, ITV and supporting Participants Shure, DeoVR, Motion Impossible and Surround Sync: This ambitious project prototypes an end-to-end workflow for immersive live streaming from music festivals, combining multi-perspective video, viewpoint-aware spatial audio, and interactive audience participation.

IBC Incubator 2026: SMART STORIES: The Agentic Production Ecosystem – Proposed by Associated Press (AP), NBCUniversal, ITN, BBC, with Co-Champions Channel 4, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, Sky and ITV and supporting Participants Shure, EVS, CUEZ and Moments Lab: Inspired by the multi-award-winning success of earlier Accelerators, this new consortium aims to define an open standard for story context interoperability in live production, spanning the full content chain from news gathering through to distribution.

To learn more about the Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, click here.