SVT has won the EBU Technology & Innovation Award 2026 for Neo, its software-defined live production platform, proven at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has named Swedish public broadcaster SVT as the winner of its Technology & Innovation Award 2026. SVT’s platform, called Neo, is a fully software-based production system that ran 10 parallel production environments and OTT channels during the 2026 Winter Olympics.
CBC/Radio-Canada and France Télévisions were the runners-up.
The winners were announced and honoured at the EBU Technology & Innovation Summit in Barcelona on 18 June 2026. The EBU Technology & Innovation Award recognises outstanding technical solutions developed by EBU Member organisations. It rewards individuals or teams who have built technologies, systems or services with the potential to make a significant difference to broadcast media.
Both awards are decided annually by the EBU Technical Committee, through individual confidential scoring by each of its members. The 2026 winners were decided by the outgoing Technical Committee, chaired by Michael Eberhard, before a new Committee was elected at the summit. The 2026 pool contained 13 nominations for the main award.
The Technology & Innovation Award recognises SVT’s Neo platform, a live production system built entirely on standard IT hardware rather than dedicated broadcast equipment. It combines IP-based transport, cloud-native principles and modular production services.
Read more Getting set for the Winter Olympics: Inside SVT’s ongoing software-based production evolution
At the 2026 Winter Olympics, Neo delivered more than 800 hours and over 150 sports productions across 10 simultaneous production environments and OTT channels, with high reliability under sustained pressure, the EBU said, adding that SVT’s Neo is a production platform and not related to EBU Neo, the EBU’s AI-powered news chatbot.
SVT designed Neo as an operational change as much as a technical one. The platform gives operators intuitive interfaces, clear feedback and predictable behaviour, bridging traditional broadcast craft and modern software workflows. The result shows that large-scale live production can be fully software-defined and is already in service, not a future prospect.
“SVT’s Neo platform is an outstanding demonstration of what a full commitment to software-defined production can achieve,” said Michael Eberhard, CTO of public media organisation SWR/ARD and outgoing Chair of the EBU Technical Committee.
“Delivering the Winter Olympics on standard IT infrastructure, at this scale and with this reliability, is a great result. It sets a benchmark for the industry and offers a practical model for any public broadcaster.”
“This award is a recognition of what can happen when talented people work together across disciplines with a shared vision,” said Dennis Buhr (pictured, above), head of production technology and workflows at SVT, who led the project.
“At SVT, innovation is not a project; it is part of how we build the production future of public service. This award belongs to everyone at SVT who has contributed to this journey, and I am proud to accept it on behalf of all the teams who helped make it possible.”
One of the two runners-up was CBC/Radio-Canada, for its Dynamic Streaming tool. The tool is a real-world deployment of the EBU Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) Reference Architecture. It let a single operator, working from a web interface on a laptop, augment Olympic Broadcast Services streams with commentary, graphics and ad breaks. The tool supported more than 140 hours of curling and wheelchair curling coverage and reached peaks of close to 500,000 viewers on the broadcaster’s gem.ca platform, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional control room.
The other runner-up was France Télévisions, for Alix, a multi-cloud, open-source platform that brings IT and media workflows onto a single Kubernetes foundation. Alix is built to be sovereign and vendor-neutral, with modules spanning hosting, security, data, media processing and AI, and is designed to support future Dynamic Media Facility deployments.
Young tech talent
Delphine Roussel-Galle, an AI engineer at France Télévisions, has won the 2026 Young Technology Talent Award. Since 2024 she has designed and led several production-grade data and AI projects at the broadcaster, progressing from individual work to leading a small engineering team. Her work applies AI to practical newsroom and editorial tools and shows the value of graduate-level engineering talent for the future of media technology.
Delphine Roussel-Galle from France Télévisions said: “I’m very happy and grateful for this Award, it is great motivation to continue innovating. Congratulations should also go to the people who contributed to the work. I want to really thank the whole team who brought together all the skills that were necessary to complete this.”
Antonio Arcidiacono, EBU Director of Technology & Innovation, said: “The 2026 Awards show how decisively public service media are moving to software and open architectures.
“SVT’s Neo platform proves that the most demanding live production in the world can also run on standard IT. That matters for every EBU Member facing the same choices, and it speaks directly to our shared goals of resilience and technological sovereignty. By recognising Delphine Roussel-Galle with the Young Technology Talent Award, we also celebrate the new generation of engineers who will carry that work forward.”
