IBC: Accelerating Innovation Podcast

With the impending shutdown of digital terrestrial and satellite television, the industry urgently needs a truly scalable, high-performing TV architecture over an entirely different technology stack. Recorded live from IBC2025, episode 13 of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the ‘Ultra Low Latency Live Streaming at Scale’ project who picked up the gauntlet.Building on the foundation of the previous year’s Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports accelerator (an L3D-DASH implementation), this project focused on the architecture needed to deliver live TV over the internet, introducing functionality expected from a production DTT channel using new open specifications. The goal was to deliver the same latency, stability, and feature set as digital terrestrial and satellite television. The Accelerator explored key technical components, including CDN and multicast ABR (mABR) integration, personalised ad insertion, and the use of CMCD v2 (upcoming CTA 5004-A) for Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and ad beaconing. The primary objective was to achieve ultra-low latency glass-to-glass delivery, near-instant playback start, and tight synchronisation across multiple viewers on consumer devices.  In this episode, Mark Smith, Lead for the IBC Accelerator Programme, was joined by Piers O'Hanlon, Senior Research and Development Engineer at BBC R&D, and Michael Loftus, Media Streaming Infrastructure Lead at RTÉ. Live at IBC2025, the project group discussed how they created a low-latency DASH-based streaming system for RTÉ News and a synthetic RTÉ Sports sequence. The team also reflected on how the industry could build on this blueprint of a viable low-latency DTT replacement in the future. 

Recorded live from IBC2025, episode 12 of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the ‘Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange’ project.  Most live production environments today remain built around hardware appliances and mixed standards. While live IP cores exist, the ecosystem still depends heavily on proprietary interconnects and fixed devices. This limits agility, scalability, and efficiency at a time when production teams increasingly need to move resources between on-premises facilities, central hubs, and the public cloud. The ‘Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange’ Accelerator investigated how broadcasters can exchange high-performance video, audio, and data between media functions using generic compute, containerisation, and open interfaces. The aim was to enable low-latency, resilient, and vendor-agnostic live production facilities that can scale dynamically and interoperate across networks and clouds. In this episode, Keran Boyd, Accelerator Project Lead at IBC, was joined by: David Atkins, CEO of Phrame; Max Smith, Developer at 3ADesign; and Peter Brightwell, Lead R&D Engineer at BBC R&D.Live at IBC2025, the project group discussed how they delivered an iteration of the EBU Media eXchange Layer (MXL)-based containerisation of cloud workflows to allow more efficient compute and interoperability amongst vendors. The team also reflected on the impact of MXL in the broader industry and where this work will go in the future. 

As broadcasters juggle an unprecedented volume of platforms and live content, control rooms are under growing pressure to merge legacy systems with cutting-edge tech. IBC2025 Accelerator Champions ITN, BBC, and Channel 4 set out to address this challenging situation – issuing a call for a purpose-built ecosystem of AI-driven production agents designed to fundamentally reimagine operators’ interaction with technology and, therefore, the future of live production galleries.Recorded live from IBC2025, episode 11 of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the 2025 IBC Incubator ‘AI Agent Assistants for Live Production’ to find out more.  Inspired by the successful R&D of the 2024 IBC Accelerator named ‘Evolution of the Control Room’, this 2025 project proposed AI-driven production assistants to intelligently integrate into control room workflows and enhance live production through AI-assisted automation.This ambitious consortium set out to tackle the haphazard amalgamation of legacy systems and evolving tech in today’s control rooms by building a "media-first" POC AI Assistant Director orchestrator. Designed from a suite of a dozen customised AI production agents, this system used natural language and voice interaction to simplify control room workflows and speed up decision-making. This Accelerator Project was then live demoed at IBC2025, where visitors had the chance to see how the technology enabled users to focus on the show, rather than the buttons.In this episode, Muki Kulhan, Accelerator Lead at IBC, was joined by: Olivier Barnich, Head of Innovation and Architecture in the R&D department of EVS; Kyle Suess, Co-Founder of Amira Labs; and Chris Abbot, CuePilot Specialist at CuePilot. The executives dive deep under the hood of their open, vendor-agnostic intelligent control room of agent-to-agent AI, to reveal how they created the system and what it means for the humans who run studio galleries.

Even faced with a world overflowing with content, users still struggle to find media that appeals to them. Infinite choice has become more exhausting than liberating. To help navigate this maze and increase viewer engagement, this international Accelerator Special Incubator Project leveraged AI and ML to engineer a bespoke system that dynamically shapes content for fans.  Recorded live from IBC2025, episode 10 of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the 2025 IBC Incubator ‘Changing the Game… Again!’ to find out more.  The project built on the success of its predecessor, “Changing the Game: Predictive Generative AI”, in 2024, and set out to construct a fully working, virtual sports companion MVP that used AI edge compute to personalise highlight reels and real-time sports data from a real BFBS football tournament.  This hyper-personalised companion enabled content to be tailored to an individual fan based on their unique preferences and interactions, while custom updates using real-time analytics on teams, players, and matches aligned with the fan's preferences to create a truly immersive and interactive way to consume live and VOD sports content, from anywhere.  In this episode, Muki Kulhan, Accelerator Lead at IBC, was joined by Russell Trafford-Jones, Industry Engagement Manager at IET, Steve Belford, Enterprise Innovation Architect at Channel 4, and Esteban Vazquez, CEO of Tesla Technologies.  The executives chat about the pros and cons of AI in sports production and its impact on fans around the world, as well as learnings in the ethics and responsible uses of AI in personalisation, audience engagement, privacy, and more. 

Celebrating the company’s 100th anniversary, associate sponsor Shure shares insight into how it has survived and thrived for over a century by prioritising innovation, diversification, and evolution. Recorded live from IBC2025, episode nine of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from Shure. The IBC Accelerator Programme brings together leading industry buyers of media technology (Champions) with vendors, suppliers, and developers (Participants) from across the world, in a project-based, accelerated environment for collaborative innovation. The projects develop solutions to common challenges identified by the Champions within a six-month time frame.Shure decided to sponsor the IBC Accelerator Programme as part of its commitment to advancing the media and entertainment sector and empowering engineers, creators, and broadcasters to achieve excellence.In this episode, Muki Kulhan, Accelerator Lead at IBC, was joined by Scott Sullivan, Vice President (VP) of Strategy and Innovation at Shure, and Chad Wiggins, Associate VP of Innovation and Product Management at Shure. The two Shure executives shared exclusive insights into the technological evolution of the practice of telling stories in sound, the importance of understanding your market, and how the company plans to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation for years to come.

In an industry bursting with creativity and new ideas, how can technology be leveraged to realise theoretical concepts into practical applications most efficiently? Two of the leading enablers of IBC Accelerators examine the impact of the 2025 programme as well as its stand-out solutions of 2025.Recorded live from IBC2025, episode eight of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from Verizon Business and AMD.  Pitched by world-leading media organisations at the Accelerator Kickstart Day event in the BBC’s iconic Radio Theatre, the projects then developed solutions that were showcased at IBC2025 as Proof of Concepts (POCs). The IBC2025 Accelerator challenges addressed pressing issues in content creation, live production and distribution, audience engagement, and technology integration, intelligent automation, sustainability, innovative ad-tech, connectivity, and many other areas of emerging media R&D.                                       In this episode, Muki Kulhan, Accelerator Lead at IBC, was joined by John Canning, Director of Strategic Partnerships and M&E at AMD, and ErinRose Widner, Global Lead of Business Strategy at Verizon Business.Paired up on the last day of IBC2025, these two industry legends and IBC Accelerator alumni chat all things innovation, collaboration, and equality in the context of today’s M&E landscape. At IBC2025 in Amsterdam, Jake Kornblatt, Vice President at Verizon Business, explored how 5G technology is facilitating the shift towards IP-based broadcasting by offering a highly reliable, low-latency service. Discover more here.Catch the full audio episode here! Or download the episode here.

With all manner of cutting-edge inventions looking to push the boundaries of the M&E industry at IBC’s Accelerating Innovation program, how is today’s technology keeping up with the demand? Associate sponsors AMD provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the CPU, GPU, and adaptive computing solutions that are powering the program’s creative solutions. Recorded live from IBC2025, episode seven of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the program’s Associate Sponsor team, AMD, to find out more.  The IBC2025 Accelerator challenges addressed pressing issues in content creation, live production and distribution, audience engagement, and technology integration, intelligent automation, sustainability, innovative ad-tech, connectivity, and many other areas of emerging media R&D.In this episode, Mark Smith, Lead for the IBC Accelerator Programme, was joined by John Canning, Director of Strategic Partnerships and M&E at AMD, and Andy Parma, Segment Director, Multinational National Company (MNC) Workstation Central Processing Unit (CPU) at AMD. Together, the experts took a look at the IBC Accelerator programme through the eyes of two of the leading evangelists and sponsors of the programme from AMD, which delivered extensive computing solutions to support the programme and many of the projects.                                                                                                                                    The all-new IBC Incubator 2025: Changing the Game Again recently set out to level up in multiple different ways. The core concept is a wide-ranging extension of the 2024 Accelerator's ‘AI Media Production Labs’, retaining several of the veteran Champions and Participants, but also widening industry engagement. Discover more here.Catch the full audio episode here! Or download the episode here.

With AI flooding all aspects of the M&E value chain, how can new entrants and legacy players upskill with hands-on experience? At IBC2025, the high-intensity, two-day Google Hackfest brought together disparate digital innovators, engineers, content creators, and tech enthusiasts to share knowledge and forge the future of broadcast.Recorded live from IBC2025, episode six of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the 2025 IBC x Google Hackfest Collaboration to find out more.  Teams from ITV, Channel 4, RTÉ and Sky came together for a day of rapid-fire innovation, creative problem-solving, and AI-powered development. The event involved: standing up broadcast infrastructure to create a FAST Channel in Google Cloud; creating content that is both real and made with GenAI; and creatively leveraging the stack and content output.In this episode, Mark Smith, Lead for the IBC Accelerator Programme, was joined by Justin Grayston, Head of Customer Engineering TMEGA at Google Cloud, and Chris Hampartsoumian, Cloud Customer Engineer, Media and Entertainment at Google Cloud. Exploring IBC's collaboration with Google Cloud to develop a Hackathon at IBC2025, the team discuss the process and results of uniting developers, creatives, and media technologists in a two-day sprint to prototype new AI-powered broadcast solutions.          At the World Skills Café (WSC) at IBC2025, Caretta Research’s Angeliki Megariti stated: “The biggest barrier for broadcast and media buyers is a lack of AI skills”. Discover more here.

In this episode, Keran Boyd, Accelerator Project Lead at IBC, was joined by Ian Nock, Vice Chair of IET; Walid-Oualid Saddi, Chief Architect at Bouygues Telecom; Benjamin Schwarz, President of Greening of Streaming; James Varndell, Senior Director of Product Management at Bitmovin; and Francois Polarczyk, Sustainability Director at Accedo.  Having delivered a digital twin of a live-to-IP workflow to better understand the impact of impactful technologies (such as multicast and P2P) in delivering content to consumers, the ECOFLOW II reflects on the greatest challenge of the project: data. The team dives into the availability of data to measure the impact of these workflows and the metrics which the industry uses to determine what is and is not sustainable.  

In this episode, Muki Kulhan, Accelerator Lead at IBC, was joined by: Clive Santamaria, Chief Architect at ITV; Tim Deussen, Creative Director of Studio Deussen; and Will Draffin, Director of Digital and Future Technology for the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Kent. The team unpacked their tech and creative process, and how ethics and responsibility in AI will continue to help shape creative storytelling for years to come. With a clear human-centric UI at its heart, the framework was designed to leverage a host of generative AI tools that could enable broadcasters and creatives to produce high-quality, photorealistic video without surrendering narrative, artistic, ethical, or compositional considerations. The team also developed a long-term vision to enable broadcasters and creative teams to work in a more structured and efficient way, while still maintaining full creative control – from ideation to production, post-production, and delivery.

In this episode, Keran Boyd, IBC Accelerator Programme Lead, welcomed: James Taylor, CEO of Insync; David Atkins, CEO of Phrame; and Russell Trafford-Jones, Industry Engagement Manager at Techex. In August 2025, this project group staged a proof-of-concept live at the Irish National Senior Track and Field Championships in Dublin. Programme feeds were delivered as SRT over the public internet, with commentary captured via WebRTC. The BBC and RTÉ MCRs worked together as a distributed team to monitor, switch, and process feeds in the cloud. The output was delivered both to RTÉ Player for public viewing and to ground-based MCRs in multiple formats. 

When content is bountiful, but trust is scarce, how can broadcasters cut through the noise and keep their audience relationships alive? Rising to a challenge set out by IBC2025 Accelerator Champions BBC and ITN in early 2025, WDR, Sony, and RTÉ had a vision for an open-source tool that could seamlessly incorporate C2PA standards into each step of the media industry’s existing workflows.  Recorded live from IBC2025, episode two of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the 2025 Accelerator Project ‘Stamping Your Content (C2PA Provenance)’ to find out more. This initiative showcased an open source ‘stamping’ tool for news broadcasters and agencies to help maintain the authenticity and provenance of content, inserting C2PA metadata at the time of publication. It also sought to develop a complementary tool to decode and verify these credentials, ensuring compliance with C2PA standards.  In this episode, Mark Smith, Lead for the IBC Accelerator Programme, welcomed: Kenneth Warmuth, Media Engineer and Project Manager at C2PA at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Hitomi Hamaba, Head of Product and Marketing Lead at Sony; and KieuTrang Nguyen Vu, Technology Intern at Ireland’s broadcaster RTÉ.  The initiative aimed to create an open source ‘stamping’ tool that links to a company’s authorization certificate, inserting C2PA metadata into content at the time of publishing. It also sought to develop a complementary tool to decode and verify these credentials, ensuring compliance with C2PA standards. Fingerprinting and watermarking technologies were used to retrieve stripped C2PA manifests from video files duringprocessing stages in a newsroom's workflow. By providing these tools, the project wanted media organizations to assert content authenticity, helping to combat misinformation and reinforce trust in digital media. 

As end-users clamour to get ever closer to the action, how can broadcasters ensure wireless connectivity in the most challenging conditions? For Strathclyde University, Eutelsat Group, and France Télévisions, it was time to take to the sky.Recorded live from IBC2025, episode one of the IBC365 Accelerating Innovation podcast hosted thought-leaders from the 2025 Accelerator Project ‘Conquering the Air (Waves): Private 5G from Land to Sea to Sky’ to find out more. This project set out to explore the deployment of moving airborne private 5G (P5G) networks to enhance live broadcast production by providing robust wireless connectivity. Building on previous demonstrations on land and sea, this project aimed to extend this capability to the sky to unlock new creative possibilities and improve live storytelling. In this episode, Mark Smith, Lead for the IBC Accelerator Programme, welcomed: Malcom Brew, Senior Engineer at Strathclyde University and its commercial offshoot Neutral Wireless; Raouia Ouerheni, Manager of Commercial Product Development at Eutelsat Group; and Yann Bureller, Project Coordinator at France Télévisions. The project aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of using airborne P5G to supplement and improve existing production workflows in challenging environments. This Accelerator aimed to push the boundaries of live production and pave the way for more flexible, cost-effective, sustainable, scalable, and immersive media production solutions.