The IBC Innovation Awards recognise significant partnerships to achieve a real creative, commercial or technical advance. To be a finalist a project has to show collaboration between the user, the principle supplier and other technology partners. Of the vast number of proposals submitted to the IBC judging panel, the ITV Yospace and Snell project is one of just four which made it to the finals in the content delivery category. The Yospace content replacement system comprises of an encoding element and a streaming element. The encoding element interfaces tightly with Morpheus automation to determine the frame accurate boundaries of replacement programming events using its Second Screen Service. The information can be tailored to the end application, and be structured at an event (programme or commercial) level or at greater resolutions for triggers within a programme if required. The timing information sent from Morpheus also includes a mechanism for the end-to-end system latency to be catered for. The streaming element switches between the standard broadcast output and the potentially tailored replacement content for each user consuming a stream. Because the Yospace streaming is a cloud service, broadcasters do not need to be concerned with scaling the number of simultaneous users and in the granularity of the content tailoring. It is perfectly possible to deliver different content streams to each individual user if required by the broadcaster. While the shortlist of finalists for the IBC2012 Innovation Awards were announced at the beginning of June, the nominees will not know who will take home the trophies until the awards ceremony itself, held on Sunday evening 9 September as part of IBC. www.ibc.org
