IBC has unveiled the nine projects that will be showcased as part of this year’s Accelerator Media Innovation Programme.
The projects selected for 2026 will now enter a six-month development phase, which culminates in live Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrations in the Accelerator Zone at IBC2026 (11th–14th September).
“The Accelerator Programme provides a unique sandbox for collaborative innovation, bringing the industry together to solve complex challenges in an open and trusted environment,” said Mark Smith, lead, IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme. “Each year, we see ideas rapidly evolve into practical solutions, with teams working together in ways that simply aren’t possible in day-to-day operations.”
The nine projects are:
Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice
Proposed by GSMA Fusion, BBC, EBU (including 5G MAG & 5G EMERGE consortia), France Télévisions, RAI (CRITS), University of Strathclyde, with supporting Participant Neutral Wireless: This project is using open 5G network APIs to dynamically prioritise broadcast devices, ensuring reliable high-quality wireless video feeds in congested environments.
FRAMES: Federated Retrieval, Agentic Media Environment and Software (Defined Workflows)
Proposed by RAI, EBU, MovieLabs with Co-Champions ITV, ETC (Entertainment Technology Center) USC (University of Southern California), XRBB (Extended Reality Berlin-Brandenburg)` and supporting Participants AMD-HP and Holli: The FRAMES Accelerator challenge aims to connect broadcaster archives, creative teams, and AI agents to accelerate pre-production through intelligent content discovery and multimodal AI collaboration.
Q-Stream: Quantum Secure, Network-Adaptive, Verifiable, Live Media Infrastructure
Proposed by IET, BFBS, with supporting Participants Tesla Technologies: Q-Stream is a proof-of-concept system that uses predictive AI orchestration, semantic video compression, and hybrid quantum-secure authentication to maintain trusted live broadcasts in severely bandwidth-limited or contested network environments.
VooPla: The Decision Twin—Decision-Ready Sustainable Digital Twins for Broadcast and Virtual Production Studios
Proposed by Digital Catapult, with supporting Participants Solve Evolve and Heliguy: VooPla explores how production-accurate digital twins of broadcast and virtual production studios can help commissioners and production teams evaluate technical feasibility, costs, and sustainability impacts earlier in the production process.
From Broadcast to Me-Cast: New Sports Engagement via Agentic Workflows
Proposed by Astro Malaysia, MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Company), with supporting Participants TCS (Tata Consultancy Services): This project explores an AI-native platform that uses agentic AI to automate live media workflows, enabling real-time personalisation, content adaptation, and new monetisation opportunities for sports and other live broadcasts.
Crystal Clear: Boosting Speech Intelligibility in Media
Proposed by Channel 4 and BBC: This project develops and pilots a metric for measuring dialogue intelligibility in audiovisual content, integrating it into broadcast production workflows to detect accessibility issues and demonstrate its use across real technical environments.
Delta Protocol: Live Media Reinvented
Proposed by DAZN: Delta Protocol transforms live streaming by reinventing the transmission layer of live media. It shifts from frame‑based delivery to a semantic model that understands which moments matter. Only meaningful event updates are sent, with the rest intelligently reconstructed at the destination. This enables hyper‑personalised, immersive and adaptive experiences at massive scale. Using AI to shift personalisation from duplication to composition, it unlocks new creative, operational and efficiency gains.
IFeL: Immersive Festival Live—Remote Presence at Scale
Proposed by SMPTE, MIT Reality Hack, with Co-Champions Kings College London, University of Galway, University of Southampton, ITV and supporting Participants Shure, DeoVR, Motion Impossible and Surround Sync: This ambitious project prototypes an end-to-end workflow for immersive live streaming from music festivals, combining multi-perspective video, viewpoint-aware spatial audio, and interactive audience participation.
IBC Incubator 2026: SMART STORIES: The Agentic Production Ecosystem
Proposed by Associated Press (AP), NBCUniversal, ITN, BBC, with Co-Champions Channel 4, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, Sky and ITV and supporting participants Shure, EVS, CUEZ and Moment Lab: Inspired by the multi-award-winning success of earlier Accelerators, this new consortium aims to define an open standard for story context interoperability in live production, spanning the full content chain from news gathering through to distribution.
