IBC showcases the 2025 Accelerators in kickstart day at BBC Broadcasting House

A series of 12 Quickfire Pitches were given by the shortlisted Accelerator Project Challenges at BBC Broadcasting House, before they were set the challenge of finding potential project partners

This week at BBC Broadcasting House, London, the hopefuls vying to be one of the eight 2025 IBC Accelerator Projects pitched live to an enthusiastic audience in a hallowed radio theatre.

The event focused on media industry innovation, with an international audience of media and entertainment technology professionals and leaders. Speakers included Tim Davie, director general at the BBC, and the 2024 Project of the Year Award was presented.

A series of 12 Quickfire Pitches were given by the shortlisted Accelerator Project Challenges, before they were set the challenge of finding potential project partners – from broadcasters to manufacturers – to set them up to make it through to the final eight.

The 12 pitches presented at 2025 Kickstart Day were:

• AI Assistant Agents in Live Production
• Ultra-Low Latency Live Streaming at Scale
• AI for Live Media
• Master Control Room in the Cloud
• Ecoflow II
• Stamping Your Content (C2PA Provenance)
• A Framework for Generative AI
• Broadcast Comms Meets Web Tech
• Conquering the Air(waves): P5G from Land to Sea to Sky
• Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange
• Holoconferencing and Interactive Social XR
• And finally, one going up to be the IBC Incubator project rather than an Accelerator, called Changing the Game… Again.

Mario Reiss, director of telecommunications at OBS, on stage pitching potential IBC Accelerator Project, Conquering the Air(waves): P5G from Land to Sea to Sky

Of the 12 pitches, there were several with potential sport focus. Among those are:

Conquering the Air(waves): P5G from Land to Sea to Sky

Presented by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the University of Strathclyde and Haivision, this one is all about sport production. The team want to be able to provide live content from hard to cover events, bringing audience closer to the action and developing and testing devices and workflows.

Mario Reiss, director of telecommunications at OBS, said: “We want to hear the athletes, their heart rate, the speed of their bicycles, and see what they see.”

Ultra-Low Latency Live Streaming at Scale

Presented by BT Media & Broadcast and Comcast, this one builds on an Accelerator from last year – Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports – and it intends to move this project forwards by demonstrating ultra-low latency streaming deployed on a large public network with numerous consumer devices. Last year the project demonstrated 1.8 second glass-to-glass ultra-low latency with four clients.

Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange

With the BBC, EBU and Appear on stage, this pitch has come out of the Connect and Produce Anywhere Accelerator from 2024, which ran tests with Formula E. It is about connecting using shared access techniques developed for high performance computing, breaking the link with synchronous working for even more performance, using joined-up timing, and enabling customisable workflows.

IBC Incubator 2025: Changing the Game… Again

Finally, Changing the Game…Again was pitched by Verizon Business Group, Xansr Media and AMD, and it moves the story on from last year’s. This is about delivering personalised highlight reels with sports and data statistics tailored to each audience member, based on information acquired by AI in an organic way.

Pitching for IBC Accelerator hopeful, IBC Incubator 2025: Changing the Game… Again

Director general speaks

Additionally, Davie, director general at the BBC spoke on stage. He stated: “The overall challenge for organisations like the BBC is, in one word, relevance. People don’t sit down of an evening and say, “I’ll give public service a break”. We know, it’ s brutal.”

He spoke about recent changes to the BBC’s R&D department, where there have been redundancies: “There’s been a lot of change [at the BBC]. It’s a massive change but were investing hard in R&D. We’ve also been hiring engineers in other areas of the business. We had 290 vacancies with 45,000 applications. So we’re very committed to [R&D]. And I want to take a risk. We’re in lovely sweet spot; working with [IBC] and others, we can literally accelerate the market.

“The BBC does self-flagellation and angst pretty well, by the way, but we’re doing pretty well,” he said on BBC iPlayer being the biggest growing OTT platform in the UK in 2024. BBC iPlayer’s viewing growth was twice that of Netflix, three times ITVX and four times that of Channel 4, the broadcaster said in a statement last September.

Davie also said on the BBC and its relationship to AI: “We’re ferociously embracing AI, but on our terms. We have AI principles, but overall we’re kind of bloody minded about AI. We absolutely want to be deploying it across the BBC, but on our terms.” He said it was being used in several areas, from translation and commentaries to editing. “it’s happening now out there in the newsroom. We’re keeping editorial control, obviously… there’s a lot of opportunity out there.”

Also on the day, the 2024 Project of the Year Award was presented, which was won by the project titled ‘Evolution of the Control Room’, and leveraged XR, voice, AI and HTML-based graphics solutions. Its Champions included Aljazeera, BBC, Channel 4, TV Danmark, EBU, HSLU, ITN, SVT, Trinity College Dublin, Vodafone, Transmixr, Yle, and XReco.

Of the 12 pitches selected, only eight challenges will be chosen to go forward as Accelerator Projects. This could mean some ideas may merge with others, where there are direct synergies. The teams then begin work on their solution and a PoC that will be unveiled and showcased on the Accelerator Zone and Innovation Stage at IBC2025 in September.

The IBC Accelerator Innovation Programme has, since its inception in 2019, reflected some of the critical business & technology challenges, with an emphasis on innovation led by end users or buyers of tech and solutions within the broad media and entertainment ecosystem.

The 2025 IBC Accelerator Kickstart Day took place in London on Wednesday 12 February.