The 2024 awards have been expanded to highlight innovation across five categories, recognising achievements in social impact and sustainability, alongside advancements in three content-related areas.
IBC 2024 has announced the winners of its Innovation Awards, recognising organisations that are reshaping the media, entertainment and technology sectors. The awards celebrate collaborative efforts to address industry challenges, with the honours presented during an evening ceremony at the RAI Amsterdam.
This year, IBC combined its Innovation and Social Impact awards into a single event, with five categories: Content Creation, Content Distribution, Content Everywhere, Social Impact and Environment & Sustainability. Sports were a key driver of innovation in 2024, as major events like the Summer Olympic Games and the UEFA European Football Championship fueled advancements, with four of the five awards linked to sports coverage.
Michael Crimp, Chief Executive Officer of IBC, said: “Recognising and fostering industry innovation at every level is core to what IBC does, and these awards play a critical role in honouring and encouraging truly ground-breaking work. This year’s expanded awards spotlight the fact that there are many areas in which we are seeing the media community collaborate to take us in new, exciting directions. I congratulate this year’s winners for demonstrating the co-operation, imagination and determination needed to really impact our industry.”
The winners of the IBC 2024 Innovation Awards were recognised across five categories for their groundbreaking work.
In the Content Creation category, Olympic Broadcasting Services and its partners were honoured for using over 200 smartphones during live production of the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony and for deploying a sea-based 5G network to support sailing events in Marseille.
The National Hockey League, in partnership with Verizon, AWS, Zixi, Vizrt, Net Insights and Evertz, won in the Content Distribution category for their 5G and Edge compute framework used to produce, control, and deliver live broadcasts.
LaLiga took home the award for Content Everywhere, recognised for working with Play Anywhere and Ease Live to enhance fan interactivity for its global broadcast and streaming partners.
In the Social Impact category, Sesame Workshop was awarded for its Watch Play Learn Distribution Hub, a platform that enables government agencies and aid organisations to access educational videos for children in crisis.
Finally, France Télévisions was recognised in the Environment & Sustainability category for reducing CO2 emissions by 300 tons through an innovative 100% glass-to-glass cloud production and private 5G network used to broadcast continuous coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic Torch Relay.
Additionally, the IBC International Honour for Excellence (IHFE) was presented to Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov for his work on the award-winning documentary 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL, which chronicled the 2022 siege of Mariupol during the Russian invasion.
The Best Technical Paper Award was given to Joshua Maraval, Nicolas Ramin and Lu Zhang for their work on advancements in radiance field techniques for volumetric video generation, exploring solutions for 3D VR experiences.
