IBC Innovation Award winners announced

The IBC Innovation Awards celebrate the partnership between a broadcaster or production company and technology suppliers that push for and deliver the quality, creativity and accessibility of content to the audience.

The IBC2015 Innovation Awards shortlist reflects some of the key issues affecting everyone in broadcasting and electronic media today. Among the shortlisted projects are new ways to regionalise content efficiently, create collaboratively and engage with audiences more closely. What makes the IBC Innovation Awards unique is that its winners are using the latest technology in real-world applications.

Vijaya Cherian, Editor of BroadcastPro ME and Editorial Director at CPI Media Group, handed over the IBC Innovation Award for Content Management to ESPN Digital Center 2, and certificates of appreciation to the other shortlisted candidates in the same category.

The winners for 2015 are listed below:

The Singer Takes it All

Channel 4

Technical Partners: 

Endemol Shine Group

Chunk

Tectonic Interactive

Electoral Reform Society

The winner is the UK’s Channel 4 and it’s talent contest The Singer Takes it All. This was entirely dependent on an app, first to allow the contestants to audition karaoke-style, then for realtime voting on live shows to choose a winner. It was a witty and engaging way to recreate the excitement of live television.

Highly Commended:

ViLoR (Virtualised Local Radio)

BBC Local Radio

Technical Partners:

Atos

Broadcast Bionics

Cisco

Comrex

EM Computers

EMC2

Glensound Electronics

HP

IMI Mobile

Mayah

Microsoft

Oracle

SCISYS

Technica del Arte

Telos Axia

VMWare

Vodafone

Vortex

ViLoR – Virtualised Local Radio – is the BBC’s project to reinvent services for the regions of the United Kingdom, keeping the content local but using innovative technology to reduce equipment costs by 75%. The 40 BBC local radio stations each have their own creative teams, but all using common centralised equipment. This is thought to be the first large-scale roll-out of broadcast technology as a service. Developed largely in-house, the project used skills and equipment from a large number of suppliers.

NBA Replay Center

National Basketball Association

Technical Partners:

Evertz

Cisco

Samsung

The Systems Group

Zayo

As part of its mission to be the most respected sports league organisation in the world, the National Basketball Association (NBA) operates a central broadcast facility in Secaucus, New Jersey. Now it has added a powerful replay centre, managed by software-defined networking, to allow its officials to provide review and decision-making. With the possibility of 15 simultaneous games and nine camera angles at each, that means managing 144 feeds while making it simple for the game officials to concentrate on getting the right decision quickly.

Digital Center 2

ESPN

Technical Partners:

Arista Networks

Evertz

VizRT

ESPN is also looking to the IP future, and has opened the first large-scale, fully ethernet connected production facility in the world. Digital Center 2 is home to five studios, 16 edit suites, six control rooms and some of the most popular sports television in the USA.

Highly Commended:

Innovative Remote Operations

dock10

Technical Partners:

Avid

Limecraft

Dock10 has rapidly developed into one of the most efficient production and post production powerhouses in the UK. It has always encouraged collaborative and remote working, and its implementation of Field Dock, which allows creative teams to connect into its post network from locations or anywhere else they choose, earns it the fourth nomination in this category.

Video-Over-IP for Content Distribution

Disney/ABC Television

Technical Partners:

Imagine Communications

Arista Networks

The Systems Group

AC Video Solutions

Disney/ABC Television Group has implemented a realtime IP distribution system for content around its New York distribution facility, based on 40 and 100 gigabit ethernet and handling uncompressed HD for more than 200 affiliated stations across the USA.

Film Soundtrack Adaptation

SBS Broadcasting

Technical Partners:

NUGEN Audio

Delta Sigma Consultancy

Minnetonka Audio

Set to be the finalist with the shortest journey to the ceremony, SBS Broadcasting in Amsterdam has been looking at ways to improve the viewer experience of its films and drama series. It recognised that maintaining dramatic, high contrast audio was key, but it needed to be achieved with the best loudness practices, particularly on channels with commercial breaks. Finally, it had to do it all in a highly efficient, automated workflow. The result was an anchor-based loudness normalisation workflow.

Regionalising TV Channels

Sundance Channel Global

Technical Partners:

Amagi Media Labs Pvt. Ltd.

AMC Networks International transmits popular television channels into Latin America. It recently faced the challenge of the need to tailor the content for Portuguese-speaking Brazil, differentiating it from the largely Spanish-speaking rest of the content. Rather than face the expense of a separate Brazil feed when only some of the content needed replacing, it developed a sophisticated system which stored replacement content in the cloud, triggering it using watermarked break bumpers. It allows a seamless workflow between AMC in New York, playout partner Telefonica in Spain and local satellite distributor Sky Brazil.

Highly Commended:

IP for Live Sports Production

Pac-12 Networks

Technical Partners:

Internet2

T-VIPS

Nevion

Pac-12 Networks – the broadcast arm of the conference of 12 west coast universities – offers an incredible 850 live televised sports events a year. To manage all of this, it uses commodity internet connections to link a basic crew at the event with its three central control rooms in San Francisco. The remarkable technology allows talkback, telemetry and telemetric data to travel to and from sports venues as much as 2500 km away with less than a frame delay.

DAB+ Towards FM Shut Off

Norkring

Technical Partners:

2WCom

Aldena

Cisco

GatesAir

Kathrein-Werke

NEC, NetCom

Net Insight

Relacom

Site Service

SmartGrid

Spinner

Telenor Satellite Broadcasting

Telmec Broadcasting

While many nations have gone through the analogue television switch-off process, few are even close to achieving it in radio. Norway is the exception: in 2017 it will shut off its FM radio network, replacing it with a DAB+ service that reaches 99.5% of the population. The country’s broadcast transmission provider Norkring is leading the project on behalf of broadcasters Digitalradio Norge, NRK, P4 Radio Hele Norge and SBS Discovery. Technology came from 2WCom, Aldena, Cisco, GatesAir, Kathrein-Werke, NEC, NetCom, Net Insight, Relacom, Site Service, SmartGrid, Spinner, Telenor Satellite Broadcasting and Telmec Broadcasting.