The winners of the IBC2025 Innovation Awards have been announced at a ceremony held at RAI Amsterdam, recognising significant achievements in content creation and delivery, social impact, and sustainability within the global media and entertainment sector.
This year’s recipients – representing four continents demonstrating the breadth of cross-industry contributions shaping the future of content production, technology, and audience engagement.
The event also recognised the recipient of the IBC International Honour for Excellence, the Best Technical Paper, the 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.
