Nominees for the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Technology and Innovation Award 2026 have been announced.
Presented at the EBU Technology and Innovation Summit and Technical Assembly, the Award recognises, encourages and supports outstanding technical solutions developed by Member organisations. This year’s winner will be announced at the EBU T&I Summit in Barcelona on 18th June, bringing together the technical leadership of public service media organisations from across and beyond the continent.
The nominees are:
Markus Korhammer, ORF, for the ORF Content Management Centre
A full SMPTE ST 2110 transformation of ORF’s broadcast operations, uniting radio, television and streaming signal routing across two high-availability zones, with new master control, playout and multifunctional production spaces. Uses one third of the previous rack space.
Félix Poulin, CBC/Radio-Canada, dynamic streaming for the Olympic and Paralympic Games
A real-world deployment of the EBU Dynamic Media Facility Reference Architecture, letting a single operator augment Olympic Broadcast Services streams from a laptop. Over 140 hours of coverage reached peaks of nearly 500,000 viewers on CBC’s OTT platform.
Heikel Manai, France Télévisions for Alix: a converged IT-media cloud platform
A multi-cloud, open-source platform bringing IT and media workflows onto a single Kubernetes foundation, with modules for subtitling, transcription, media processing and AI inference. Sovereign, vendor-neutral and built to support Dynamic Media Facility deployments.
Romuald Rat, France Télévisions for Mediaenrich: AI-driven editorial metadata at scale
An AI platform built with Télécom SudParis that segments programmes into editorial sequences and combines visual, audio and contextual analysis to generate broadcast-grade metadata at a fraction of commercial costs. Free of licence fees for EBU Members.
Lukas Krohn-Grimberghe and Stefan Köhler, ARD, Germany for ARD Sounds: the play button for your day
A unified digital audio platform that brings podcasts, live radio and event streams from across ARD’s regional broadcasters into a single user-centric app, with intelligent recommendations and curated collections aimed at younger, digitally native audiences.
Philipp Jacobs, SWR Germany, for Fehler IM System: live multi-camera virtual production
A new workflow that allows live switching between multiple tracked cameras on a single LED volume, overcoming the single-camera limit of traditional virtual production. Proved on a multi-hour role-playing game streamed live on Twitch.
Mariangela Borneo, Roberto Iacoviello and Alberto Ciprian, Rai, Italy, a framework for generative AI
An IBC Accelerator project led by Rai with VRT, YLE, EBU, Globo, ITV and partners, delivering a modular framework that standardises prompts and metadata across text, image, audio and video tools. Validated through the photorealistic trailer Echoes of Rome.
Frida Thelin, SVT for NEO: software-defined live production at Olympic scale
A fully software-based production platform running on standard IT hardware, used to deliver ten parallel production environments and OTT channels at the 2026 Winter Olympics—more than 800 hours and 150 sports productions in total.
Paul McGrath, BBC, machine learning assisted MCR audio monitoring
A model trained to recognise what BBC Radio 5 Live should sound like, alerting when distortion appears that conventional equipment treats as valid audio. Runs on a Raspberry Pi, demonstrating that application-specific machine learning needs neither LLMs nor server racks.
Clive Santamaria, ITV, sustainable production with solar and battery power
Hybrid power systems using second-life EV batteries and solar deployed on shoots including I’m a Celebrity and Nobody’s Fool, cutting fuel consumption by up to 60 per cent. The team is open-sourcing its learnings as a blueprint for the wider industry.
Clive Santamaria, ITV, intelligent automation through commodity AI workflows
A self-service platform that lets teams across ITV build their own AI-powered automations by connecting everyday tools and systems, with no coding required. More than 2,000 hours of staff time saved in the first six months.
Clive Santamaria, ITV for AI agent hub: governed multi-model access
A single governed interface for switching between approved foundation models and building prompt-based assistants, with central routing, role-based access, audit logging and provenance controls. Trial users reported time savings (70 per cent) and quality gains (over 80 per cent).
Clive Santamaria, ITV, qualitative enricher: AI reasoning at scale for ITVX
An AI service that generates qualitative metadata for ITVX—ranking the most recognisable cast members and describing mood and atmosphere—with a secondary AI scoring outputs and a daily budget cap. Costs less than £10 a month to run.
