Winner of the IBC2025 Innovation Awards’ Content Creation category is Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth – Produced by NHK Japan, in co-production with ZDF/ARTE and OceanX, in collaboration with CMMAI, captured in 8K and 22.2 sound, the world’s first-ever video footage of a group of coelacanths. Technical support was provided by GOTO Aquatics, SGO and Restar

IBC unveiled the winners of the prestigious IBC2025 Innovation Awards at a ceremony held at the RAI Amsterdam, recognising outstanding advances across content creation and delivery, social impact, and sustainability in the global media and entertainment industry.

The Innovation Awards celebrate collaborative, real-world breakthroughs, and this year’s winners span four continents – showcasing how diverse, cross-sector efforts are shaping the future of content creation, technology, and audience engagement. The ceremony also honoured the recipient of IBC’s International Honour for Excellence, the Best Technical Paper, an IBC2025 Special Award and the IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2024.

“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.”

The 2025 IBC Innovation Awards winners across the five categories were:

Content Creation
Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth – Produced by NHK Japan, in co-production with ZDF/ARTE and OceanX, in collaboration with CMMAI, captured in 8K and 22.2 sound, the world’s first-ever video footage of a group of coelacanths. Technical support was provided by GOTO Aquatics, SGO and Restar.

Content Distribution
Sky’s MediaMesh – Sky Group integrated systems and workflows of broadcasters across Europe to deliver an API-driven, cloud-native, modular platform. With AWS, SDVI, Telestream, and TMT Insights.

Content Everywhere
SVT-AV1: Alliance for Open Media, Intel and Meta – Made video streaming viable on low-end mobile devices and low-bandwidth networks, via development of decoding-aware mode of the SVT-AV1 software encoder.

Social Impact
Empowering citizen advocacy and social justice through technology – The Mobile Justice app, developed with the American Civil Liberties Union, enables citizens to document law enforcement encounters in real-time and upload evidence for review. Technical partners are Jotto, Quadrant2 and Wowza.

Environment & Sustainability
World First Greening Live Broadcasts: Energy-Efficient UHD Upscaling with NPU for Sustainable IPTV Service – 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 80% energy reduction and preventing 3,728 tons CO₂eq emissions annually.

Additional awards previously announced and presented at the ceremony were:

International Honour for Excellence (IHFE)
This year’s IHFE was awarded to Thelma Schoonmaker, the legendary film editor whose collaboration with Martin Scorsese over five decades has helped shape the visual language of modern cinema. Schoonmaker is the only editor to receive nine Oscar nominations, winning three Academy Awards and a BAFTA Fellowship.

Special Award
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.

Best Technical Paper
The award for Best Technical Paper was given to Alexis Allemann, Sébastien Noir and Andrei Popescu-Belis, from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and la Haute École d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD), for their paper titled EBU NEO – A sophisticated multilingual chatbot for a trusted news ecosystem exploration. The paper tackles the challenge of trusted AI-generated news using Retrieval Augmented Generation and a growing 3.5 million-article database.

IBC Accelerator Project of the Year 2024
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 Accelerator Project of the Year 2024 was awarded to Evolution of the Control Room – Leveraging XR, Voice, AI & HTML-Based Graphics Solutions