IBC MEDIA INNOVATION PROGRAMME 2020
Responding to the myriad of complex digital transformation challenges and the need to innovate at speed in today’s Media & Entertainment industry, IBC introduced the Accelerator Media Innovation Programme in early 2020. The programme is a framework for fast track, open and collaborative innovation - facilitated and supported by IBC - with projects that address critical media & entertainment industry business and technology challenges.
The challenges were set by project ‘Champions’, typically broadcasters, studios and other content providers who are supported by teams of expert vendors and solutions providers. Some eight exceptional Accelerator projects were selected to develop solutions over the course of 6 months in 2020.
Addressing challenges in the fields of AI, 5G, CG Animation and VFX as well as IP transition,projects culminated in demonstrations and discussions of their solution and proof of concepts, during IBC virtual ‘Showcase’ in September 2020.
For more on the individual Accelerators, teams and demonstrations, see below with links to fascinating individual highlight videos for each project…
VIRTUAL AND COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS CONTINUE TO DRIVE INDUSTRY INNOVATION
Through the Accelerators, multicompany teams come together – led by game changing broadcasters, studios, platforms and content owners as ‘Champions’ - to develop solutions to use cases working with expert vendors and solutions providers as project ‘participants’. Projects develop over an intensive five months’ project path, culminating in innovative solutions that will be showcased as proof of concepts at IBC Showcase.
The Programme has been created by IBC to drive sector-wide digital transformation, where Accelerators ultimately demonstrate business value through an open R&D approach, reflecting the value of industry of standards and best practices.
Challenges in 2020 address many relevant and topical areas, such as industry transformation and transition to IP and cloud workflows, the evolution of 5G, VR/AR/MR, the application of AI in many media processes, visual effects archiving, sustainability and many others.
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5G Remote Production
With 5G & Remote Production one of the hottest industry topics of 2020, this Accelerator (championed by no less than ten world leading broadcasters) set out to design and evaluate an early stage PoC for 5G Remote Production capabilities. The PoC concluded with an astonishing live demonstration of 5G enabled remote production capabilities across four locations in Amsterdam in London....
Accelerator Champions: BBC (Project Lead, Ian Wagdin), Al Jazeera Media Networks, BT, ITV, SVT, TV2, ViacomCBS, Yle, Olympic Broadcast Services, EBU
Participants: Mobile Viewpoint, Huawei, Aviwest, Sony, LiveU, NewTek
Virtual & Interactive Live Music Talent Show
Warner Music & MTV International team up to transpose the existing, traditional talent show and new music discovery formats into a cutting-edge platform that will feature real-time, multi-user digital and virtual broadcasts, UGC interactivity and an ethical-AI backend to protect fans and showcase more music talent than ever before...
Accelerator Champions: MTV International/ViacomCBS (Project Lead, Bianca Acca), Warner Music
Participants: Joi Polloi, Never.No, Grabyo
TV Delivered As Objects
This Accelerator set out to build a prototype demonstrating how future TV can be personalised and delivered over IP, setting out to test how far it could push creating truly personalised delivery of TV programmes, by leveraging cutting edge technologies from the source to the consuming device…
Accelerator Champions: ITV (Project Lead), BBC, Yle, Unity Technologies, TV2
Participants: Dazzl, Eluvio, Grass Valley, Singular.live
AI-Automated Video Shotlisting
This project was led by the Associated Press with the goal to exploit AI in fully automating the process of producing raw and edited content shot lists, which today is a manual, time intensive and very costly process and therefore a major pain point for news agencies and broadcasters...
Accelerator Champions: Associated Press (Project Lead, Sandy MacIntyre), Al Jazeera Media Networks, ETC
Participants: Metaliquid, Vidrovr, Limecraft
Usable VFX Archive
Championed by Movielabs - representing the major Hollywood studios - this Accelerator set its sights on creating a framework for realising and exploiting value in VFX for film, TV & games assets, and future-proofing IP, through the automation of archiving 3D components...
Accelerator Champions: MovieLabs (Raymond Drewry: Project Lead), Universal Studios, Paramount Studios, Sony Innovation Studios, Unity Technologies
Participants: Perfect Memory, Atmecs, Vidispine
CG Animation Production: New Immersive & Real-Time Workflows
The goal for this challenge was to redesign the current approach to CG animation production pipelines to create and deliver a transformative workflow that will ultimately make creating animated content extremely time efficient, democratised, artist-friendly, nimble, collaborative, see how the team delivered against this goal this with a compelling PoC showcase....
Accelerator Champions: Unity Technologies, Unreal Engine/Epic Games, SKY
Participants: AEON Productions, Blue Zoo Aninimation Studio, MasterpieceVR, InstaLOD, Tvori, National film board of Canada
Live Content Moderation
Proving the value of conducting real-time, AI-driven content moderation on live broadcast content - including UGC - at scale and speed, world leading news broadcasters and agencies adressed a critical challenge in processing the ever growing volume of video, by exploiting AI to automate the process of identifying and flagging inappropriate content...
Accelerator Champions: Al Jazeera (Grant Totten, Project Lead), Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, RTÉ
Participants: Metaliquid, TV Conal, TVU
5G Centralised Streaming for Location-based Virtual Reality (LBVR)
This unique challenge & PoC aimed to showcase an advanced, high-performance 5G network to connect real-time centralised graphic and spatial XR computing power into an E2E solution operations system to centrally stream premium, immersive Virtual Reality (VR) content to head-mounted displays (HMD).
Accelerator Champions: Telenet/Liberty Global (project lead), Park Entertainment
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