IABM announces 2017 Award winners plus Honorary Membership

The IABM awards recognise outstanding achievement in three key areas of the broadcast and media technology industry: the flow of young talent into the industry; technological innovation; and creative collaboration between technology vendors and end-users. A fourth award – Honorary Membership of IABM — is made to an individual who has played a major role in the development of the industry and contributed to the advancement of IABM over the course of their career.

IABM Young Person of the Year – sponsored by ARRI

Aleksei Bukhalov

Aleksei is studying for a Master’s Degree at the St.Petersburg State University of Film and Television. His dissertation is on applications of eye-tracking in the media industry – highly relevant to immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality. Aleksei was selected by IABM as one of the students it takes to NAB and IBC every year to give them an inside view of the industry. “Aleksei grabbed the opportunity to visit IBC this year with both hands; he came with a plan to extract maximum benefit and fulfilled it. The academic and practical insights he took away will greatly benefit his studies and subsequent career in the industry,” said IABM Head of Training, Andy Jones.

IABM Peter Wayne Award for Design and Innovation

All the winners of the IABM’s NAB Game Changer Awards and IBC Design & Innovation Awards are automatically shortlisted for the year’s top broadcast and media technology prize – the Peter Wayne Award for Design and Innovation. The judges faced a daunting task in selecting the eventual winner:

EVS – X.ONE Single operator live multi-cam production

The judges said: “Today’s consumers expect access to more live events than ever before. it’s not only traditional broadcasters but also brands, media companies, social media and internet platforms that need to produce broadcast-quality live content using smaller-scale resources. This product is the future of event coverage.”

IABM Creative Collaboration Award – sponsored by Aperi

This new award celebrates ground-breaking innovations that have been realised through creative collaboration between technology suppliers and their customers. It is yet another initiative in the Association’s drive to bring the interests of technology vendors and their broadcast and media customers ever closer together. It seeks to recognize break-through solutions resulting from close partnership between technology supplier(s) and their customer that provide measurable commercial or creative benefits to the customer. The first winner of this award is:

SDVI Corporation with Fox Networks Group, Discovery Communications and Turner

SDVI Rally is a media supply chain manager that optimizes the infrastructure of a media facility, enabling dramatic improvements in utilisation and time to revenue. Rally product development requires intimate knowledge of how existing operations will transition to a virtualised infrastructure. SDVI established special relationships with Fox, Discovery, and Turner in which each company worked directly with SDVI in an agile, continuous planning, development, and evaluation process centred on each company’s targeted use cases. One of the judges commented on the winning collaboration: “I love this. The idea of working with the customer to understand what they want to achieve and embedding them in the agile development process is in many ways the ultimate expression of creative collaboration.”

IABM Honorary Membership

John Ive, BA, MIET, CEng, Life Fellow SMPTE, RTS Fellow & Silver Medal Holder

John Ive joins an exclusive club of people who have had an enormous impact on the broadcast industry as it has grown and developed over the last 40+ years. “John Ive has made an enormous, continuous contribution to our industry over more than 40 years and richly deserves this recognition,” said Peter White, IABM CEO. “His energy and drive, combined with his intuitive understanding of our industry and his natural ability to communicate, have also been invaluable in helping to develop IABM into the wide-ranging, authoritative organisation that it is today.