The IBC Awards Ceremony took place last night, a dazzling evening recognising some of the very best advances in technology. The large and enthusiastic audience recognised a wide range of practical achievements from live broadcasting to archives; radio and television; from the chips inside a mobile phone to an app that runs on it.
The International Honour for Excellence is IBC’s leading award, and this year it went to ARM, the developer of embedded processing technologies. In 2014 12 billion devices used ARM technology. That included virtually every smartphone and tablet, but ARM processors are also key to networking and wireless devices and are embedded in cameras too.
The IBC Innovation Awards are the centrepiece of the evening. These awards reflect the way that collaboration between multiple vendors and end users can create effective new solutions. The finalists celebrated on stage all demonstrated technology in action.
From a bigger list of nominations than ever, this year’s winners were a live voting app for Channel 4 in the UK, a regionalisation system for Sundance in Brazil, and a new all-IP studio and production complex for ESPN in the USA.
The judging panel have a fourth award in their gift, the Judges’ Prize. This year this went to the International Olympic Committee for its remarkable work on conserving, digitising and making available its 100 year old archive. In the spirit of the awards, the IOC brought in specialist technology partners from around the world.
Exhibitors were honoured with three prizes going to the most practical and eye-catching stands. You can see pictures of the winning stands on page 8 in this issue of The IBC Daily.
The conference prize this year went to Tim Borer and Andrew Cotton of BBC Research and Development, for their paper on a practical implementation of high dynamic range television. That linked very neatly into the finale of the show, in which Dominic Glynn from Pixar talked aboutextended colour gamut for the cinema, in a sneak preview of his keynote this morning, and the screening of the movie Inside Out
this evening.
Find out more about the 2015 IBC Awards at www.ibc.org/awards.
