The winners of the IBC Innovation Awards were revealed at a ceremony at the Amsterdam RAI yesterday evening. Awards were presented across five categories in innovation and social impact, alongside honourees for IBC2025’s International Honour for Excellence (IHFE), Best Technical Paper, an IBC2025 Special Award and Accelerator of the Year.
The ceremony began with host Sasha Twining presenting the IHFE to Thelma Schoonmaker. The legendary film editor's collaboration with Martin Scorsese over five decades has helped shape the visual language of modern cinema. She is also the only editor to receive nine Oscar nominations, winning three Academy Awards and a BAFTA Fellowship.
Schoonmaker said: “Thank you so much for this wonderful and important award that I will share with Martin Scorsese. We edit his films together, to say nothing of the incredible footage he gives me each time, and he will be terribly pleased to get this. It’s wonderful for those of us who beat our brains out, and love it, making movies, and here I am with all the people who are going to make sure they are shown properly, loudly and with bright light”, she laughed. “I’m terribly grateful to get this, and it’s going to be wonderful for Marty and me to share it. He taught me everything I know about editing. I can’t thank you enough.”
The Content Creation award was won by Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth, a documentary that captured the world’s first-ever video footage of a group of coelacanths in 8K and 22.2 sound. It was produced by NHK Japan, in co-production with ZDF/ARTE and OceanX, in collaboration with CMMAI. Technical support was provided by GOTO Aquatics, SGO and Restar.
The Content Distribution accolade went to Sky’s MediaMesh. Sky Group integrated systems and workflows of broadcasters across Europe to deliver an API-driven, cloud-native, modular platform, working with AWS, SDVI, Telestream and TMT Insights.
SVT-AV1, developed by the Alliance for Open Media, Intel and Meta, won the Content Everywhere award. SVT-AV1 makes video streaming viable on low-end mobile devices and low-bandwidth networks, via the development of a decoding-aware mode of the SVT-AV1 software encoder.
The Mobile Justice app, developed with the American Civil Liberties Union, took home the Social Impact award. The app enables citizens to document law enforcement encounters in real-time and upload evidence for review. Technical partners are Jotto, Quadrant2 and Wowza.
World First Greening Live Broadcasts: Energy-Efficient UHD Upscaling with NPU for Sustainable IPTV Service was the winner of the Environment & Sustainability award. Korea’s SK Telecom, with Pixtree, developed an NPU-based live UHD upscaler and integrated it into SK Broadband’s IPTV service (Btv) live channels, serving 6.7 million subscribers while achieving an 80% reduction in energy and preventing 3728 tons CO₂eq emissions annually.
In addition, the IBC Special Award was presented to Globo, Latin America’s largest media company, for a century of innovation in storytelling, audience connection and digital transformation. Globo is currently leading Brazil’s TV 3.0 rollout and pioneering ethical AI integration across its operations.
Alexis Allemann, Sébastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis from the European Broadcasting Union and la Haute École d'Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud, received the award for Best Technical Paper for their paper entitled EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration. It tackles the challenge of trusted AI-generated news using Retrieval Augmented Generation and a growing 3.5 million-article database.
Finally, the Accelerator Project of the Year was awarded to Evolution of the Control Room – Leveraging XR, Voice, AI & HTML-Based Graphics Solutions. This transformative project reimagined live production workflows by developing XR- and AI-powered solutions that enable remote and collaborative content creation using distributed studios, voice commands, automation and cloud-based graphics. The project was championed by an exceptional consortium of media leaders and academic institutions: ITN, BBC, TV2 Denmark, YLE, EBU, Channel 4, Technological University of the Shannon (TUS)/Transmixr, Trinity College Dublin, HSLU Lucerne University, Switzerland, Al Jazeera Media Networks, XReco, Vodafone Group and SVT. Project participants included Tinkerlist, Nxt Edition, Loopic, SPX Graphics, Cuepilot and Erizos.TV.
“The IBC Innovation Awards highlight how our industry continues to evolve – solving real-world challenges through ingenious technology, social leadership and cooperative vision,” said Fergal Ringrose, Chair of the Innovation Awards Jury. “Our 2025 winners show that innovation isn't just about what’s practical – it’s about what's possible, impactful and transformative across content, society and sustainability.”
Three-time Academy Award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker treated IBC2025 to an intimate and insightful overview of her storied career. Discover more here.
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