Kickstart Day 2025: Evolution of the Control Room wins Project of the Year

Revealed during the Accelerator programme’s Kickstart Day 2025 – taking place at BBC’s Broadcasting House on 12th Feb – the annual award is presented to the top project as reviewed by an independent jury of media professionals.

Combining two original Accelerator challenge proposals into a wide-ranging project, the Evolution of the Control Room looked to break technical boundaries and pose wider industry questions around live production workflows, architectures and controls.

The project featured two R&D streams: one focussed on the control room looking at XR, AI and voice control, and the other examining modular solutions with HTML-based graphics.

Discussing some of the original motivations behind the concept, Grace Dinan, TUS Senior VP Broadcast Specialist with TRANSMIXR, said: “Rather than aiming to replace the traditional on-premise control room altogether, we wanted to develop an alternative solution that can add value where it’s most needed. For instance, during rapid scale-up of production facilities during a special event like an election, or the Olympics.”

Demonstrated at IBC2024, the resulting proof-of-concepts showcased a customisable, virtual control room for XR head-mounted displays (HMD); AI solutions for sourcing, analysing and reporting news; AI-assisted voice control (in XR and on-prem) in live production environments; voice-driven automation to enable presenters to trigger events and sequences; XR studio solutions with live volumetric video offering multi-format delivery; and an end-to-end HTML-based graphics workflow that supported multi-platform delivery.

IBC Accelerators

IBC Accelerator Programme has been running since its inception in 2019, each year reflecting on key emerging themes within the broad media and entertainment ecosystem, with projects covering a wide range of relevant industry challenges in topical areas, including AI, connectivity, sustainability, IP workflows, news and disinformation, ad-tech, cybersecurity and content protection, and immersive tech, among others. 

Only eight of the projects presented at Kickstart Day will be selected for further development, culminating with a demonstration at IBC2025 from 12-15 September at the RAI Amsterdam.

The 2023 Project of the Year Award was presented to the Responsive Narrative Factory team, which delivered the right narrative for any consumer in real-time via a metadata-powered content fast-track. This demonstrated a new component-based approach to quickly and cost-effectively create multiple versions of content from a single master to enable precision targeting of programs to different demographics, regions or groups that can be monetised for premium FAST advertisers. The team comprised Champions BBC and IET, and Participants Infuse Video, Metarex, Cuvo, JPB Media Solutions and EZDRM.

For full details of the IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme’s annual Kickstart Day 2025 agenda, click here.

Evolution of a control room - team summary:

CHAMPIONS

TRANSMIXR/TUS, BBC, ITN, TV2 Danmark, YLE, EBU, Channel 4, Trinity College Dublin, HSLU Lucerne University, Switzerland, Vodafone, XRECO, Al Jazeera Media Networks, SVT

PARTICIPANTS

Tinkerlist, NxtEdition, SPX Graphics, Cuepilot, Loopic, Erizos.TV