Last chance to enter the prestigious IBC2024 Innovation Awards

This year’s awards bring together IBC’s innovation and social impact awards under one umbrella to enable a single celebration of different industry advances across five categories. All parts of the IBC community are invited to put forward entries for projects, programmes, and initiatives.

The expanded IBC Innovation Awards recognise the best in collaborative efforts to develop new solutions to real-world technical challenges and to address social and environmental issues. The five categories are: Content Creation, Content Distribution, Content Everywhere, Social Impact, and Environment & Sustainability.

“The IBC Innovation Awards are an IBC keystone, recognising industry innovations of all types – enabling our community to celebrate together those critical breakthroughs we have made during the past year,” said Fergal Ringrose, IBC Innovation Awards Chair of the Judges. “This year’s awards reflect the many ways in which industry pioneers are redefining media – whether through technological or social advances. The expanded awards exemplify IBC efforts to lead innovation, highlighting the spirit of cooperation and creative accomplishments that positively impact the businesses involved and the industry overall.”

The three established technical categories of the IBC Innovation Awards recognise completed projects of any size that have overcome real-world creative, operational, or commercial challenges faced in the media and entertainment industry through solutions demonstrating cooperation between end users and technology partners. The two further categories recognise initiatives and campaigns that are making a difference within the industry in social advancement and equality, and environmental responsibility.

The winners of the 2023 IBC Innovation Awards were: The BBC and partners for the world’s largest pop-up 5G standalone non-public network, using shared spectrum for live broadcast contributions for the Coronation of HM King Charles III (Content Creation); Sky Group for its cloud-native software playout platform enabling origination of linear content TV channels across European territories (Content Distribution); and KAN, which changed the way Israeli audiences watched World Cup Qatar 2022 and Eurovision 2023 with Sport BUFF real-time interactive engagement (Content Everywhere).

The winners of the 2023 IBC Social Impact Awards, now joined with the Innovation Awards, were: RTVE, which used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide local election news coverage of nearly 5,000 small Spanish municipalities; SWI swissinfo.ch, which introduced a data-driven process to evaluate the use of inclusive language in its multi-lingual digital newsroom; and Iron Mountain Data Centers, which are on the path to using 100% locally sourced clean electricity, 100% of the time, to make their operations carbon-free.

To win an IBC Innovation Award, nominees must show that the commissioning company worked closely with technology partners to deliver a clever, appropriate and innovative solution to a real business, technical or creative issue. To enter the Social Impact category, nominees do not need to show how they have harnessed new technology, (unless this is relevant), but they must demonstrate innovation, real purpose, and results.

The cost is £500 for each entry, with the exception of the Social Impact category which is free to enter.

As 2024 sees major sporting events taking place in July, IBC will allow entries for projects that will have been completed by the end of July.