IBC has announced the winner of the 2022 Accelerators Programme at the IBC2023 Accelerators Kickstart event at the IET.
The Accelerator Project of the Year Award 2022 was presented to the innovative team behind the project: ‘5G Remote Production… in the middle of nowhere’, which included a solution developed by the University of Strathclyde, essentially a private 5G network in a box. The Honorable Mention was awarded to the Volumetric Video for Broadcasting, Metaverse Production and RT3D Assets project.
The cutting-edge project proved the portability of a flexible, private 5G ‘network in a box’ for live broadcast production use cases, for untethered broadcast production in real world scenes.
The 2022 winning team showcased its live use case for the project PoC at the IBC show in September, demonstrating how they used extremely remote geographical locations as their setting, including Kenya, New Zealand, Southern Ireland and the highlands of Scotland. It was also used as part of the live coverage of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s final departure from Scotland on 13 September 2022.
Read more 5G in broadcast: 5G TV online
The extensive innovation challenges spanned from developing architecture and workflows, including local testing of equipment, to demonstrating that these 5G-NPN can be used now to support and enable production, from almost anywhere, using Low Earth Orbit Satellite for backhaul.
Participants of the winning project include AMD, Microsoft, Net Insight, Zixi, HAIVISION, Singular.Live, Nulink, AWS, and Vislink.
The project was championed by BBC, BT Sport, BT Media & Broadcast, RTÈ, TV2, Olympic Broadcasting Services, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, University of Strathclyde, Scotland 5G Centre, and Neutral Wireless.
Professor Robert Stewart from the University of Strathclyde said: ”Thanks really to IBC and the Accelerators for making it possible and that’s why we’re so keen to stay involved because it’s great and really does accelerate and I think that’s what we showed with the project.”
In the presentation video from IBC2022, Purminder Gandhu, BBC Technology Transfers and Partnerships Manager revealed that having access to a network that goes some way to increase production security with robust upload speeds is “absolutely what we need. We’ve been involved with the Accelerators since 2020, this project this year was absolutely a natural outcome and progression [from] where we got to in the two previous years and it’s been really exciting to see that genesis and it developing.”
George Bevir, Editor, SVG and one of the judges for the IBC2022 Accelerators, said: “The range and number of of Champions and Participants involved in the project was also a great example of the strength of the Accelerator programme in general, in being able to draw together an impressive group of organisations from a range of locations. The PoC (and subsequent use for coverage of the Queen’s funeral) provided a clear demonstration of the work and progress of the Accelerator project.”
Other leading projects covered a range of themes from cloud based live events, next generation news studios, and audio in the metaverse.
Find out more about the winning project, 5G Remote Production … in the middle of nowhere and the other ground-breaking IBC2022 Accelerators projects here.
The lively IBC2023 Accelerators Kickstart Day took place at London’s IET, aimed at broadcasters, platforms, studios and key media & technology vendors. The event delivered a full programme of industry innovation, networking and ground-breaking pitches for new Accelerator projects that will be judged and selected for development through 2023, with the completed projects to be presented at the IBC2023 Show on 15-18 September.
The IBC Accelerator Programme was launched in 2019, to support the media and entertainment industry with a framework for agile, collaborative and fast-track innovation through a multi-company project-based approach to solving complex media and entertainment business and technology challenges.
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