IBC Extends Submission Deadline To 2023 Accelerator Media Innovation Program

IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) today extended the deadline for new business or technology challenges to be submitted to the next cycle of its Accelerator Media Innovation Program, an industry initiative supporting collaborative innovation in the media and entertainment technology sector. More than 200 organizations have been involved in 27 projects since its inception in 2019.

The deadline for submissions is now Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023, after which IBC will select six to eight projects to go forward at its annual Kickstart Day event in London on Feb. 8, 2023. The selected projects will be developed over the following five to six months and their solutions culminating as proof of concept showcases at IBC 2023 in Amsterdam (Sept. 15-18 2023). Further details of Kickstart Day will be announced in January. To register your interest, click here.

“The Accelerator program has captured a lot of attention and engagement across the industry because of its unique formula for collaborative innovation,” said Mark Smith, head of the program for IBC. “The program includes the process to identify the common challenges of the technology buyers and the dialogue around these pain points; the framework for them to work together in developing open solutions; and the ability to experiment in a trusted environment with real world use cases.”

He added: “The value of this approach has been seen in the quality of outcomes and proofs of concepts over the last four years. Now we are seeing the fruits of many of these projects with commercial implementations and real world deployments happening as a result, as was the case with our ground breaking 5G Remote Production project immediately after IBC Show this year.”

Recent projects have explored key challenges and opportunities in 5G for remote production and XR events, live event-based cloud production as well as cloud for content localization, volumetric video, spatial audio, blockchain and others.

Champion organizations that took part in 2022 included: Barco Digital Cinema, BBC, BT Media & Broadcast, BT Sport, CNN, DAZN, ESL/ Weavr, Hado, ITV, OBS, Paramount, Pokémon, Production Park, Reuters, Scotland 5G Centre, TV2, Vodafone, Warner Bros and others.

Discovery and vendor participants included: AMD, AWS, B&D, Codemill, EIDR, Eluvio, Fabric, Grass Valley, Haivision, IVCR, Iyuno-SDI, LMT, Magic Beans, Mediakind, Microsoft, Native Waves, Net Insight, Noitom, Neutral Wireless, Nulink, Nxt Edition, Production Park, ProMod Esports, Rightsline, SDVI, Singular.live, Tag Video Systems,Tata Elxsi, THEO Technologies, TuneURL, Uniqfeed, Vidispine, Vislink, Zixi and others.

The program also brought together some world leading academic institutions to take part in the projects, including University of Strathclyde, Kings College London, Trinity College Dublin, Hochschule Lucern, University of Southern California/ETC and University of Surrey.

Projects are open to all in the media & entertainment eco-system to either propose (along with the requisite number of Champions and Participants), or to join projects that are proposed and announced closer to Kickstart Day in February 2023.

Full details of IBC’s Accelerator Programme can be found here, including an FAQ with entry guidance, an overview deck and the online entry form, sponsorship pack, and all the background on last year’s projects with video showcase demonstrations and discussions at IBC 2022.