On Sunday night the IBC Awards Ceremony underlined just how far electronic media has extended into our world, far beyond its origins in television. Honours went to sport presentation in the USA and international programme exchange in the Middle East, with recognition of those researching the cutting edge in engineering, and taking opera to the people.
The fast-paced ceremony brought most of the winners on to the stage of the RAI Auditorium, with one notable guest appearing live in HD on the giant screen. And the evening ended with a tribute to a winner from six years ago.
“This year’s Awards Ceremony was a great experience for everyone who attended,” said Michael Crimp, IBC’s chief operating officer. “The IBC community came together to honour both the innovation and the creativity which is the hallmark of our industry; we enjoyed some glorious music; and we were privileged to get a unique glimpse of remarkable movie-making.”
Innovation Awards
The IBC Innovation Awards celebrate excellence in technology, but more than that they reward the application of the technology. They recognise the way that vendors and users have to work together to create advanced solutions which are satisfying technically and commercially.
This year the top prize, the Judges’ Award, went to the Arab States Broadcasting Union for its MENOS project โ multimedia exchange network over satellite. Developed by Newtec and hosted by Arabsat this is a revolutionary concept which handles all programme exchanges between the 28 member broadcasters as data files. The store and forward design makes for fast, secure and highly efficient exchange.
“What impressed us about this entry most was the way that the partners worked together to harness the technology in a project to move the business forward,” said Michael Lumley, chairman of the judging panel. “It is an innovative solution to a real, practical, commercial requirement which will make the ASBU and its broadcaster members more effective.”
Accepting the award, Dr Riyadh Najm said “We are very proud of MENOS as one of our most innovative and challenging projects, and we are really appreciative to IBC and to the international community to recognise it.”
He went on to acknowledge his colleagues in ASBU: “I would like to thank all those who have worked very hard from ASBU to make this regional and Arab project achieve this recognition in the international arena. Thank you very much, and thanks once again to IBC.”
There are three categories in the IBC Innovation Awards, for content creation, content management and content delivery. The ASBU MENOS project also won the award for best content delivery: also shortlisted and highly commended were the new TV Barrandov channel in the Czech Republic and Virgin Media’s intelligent advertising system for video on demand.
Taking the award for content creation was sports broadcaster ESPN for its Virtual Playbook system. This takes a special version of an EA Sports computer game, running on an Xbox, and uses it to recreate plays on the studio floor, with live presenters interacting with the virtual players. The other two shortlisted projects for content creation were for tapeless HD news at Expert TV in Moscow, and the Oceanocam underwater high definition camera.
Belgian state broadcaster RTBF took home the content management honour for NumProd, a new digital workflow. This brings radio, television and online services into a single service-oriented approach. Appearing on stage to collect their highly commended certificates were YLE from Finland for Metro a unified media management and archive project and Mediaset from Italy, who have developed a system for seamlessly repurposing content for new delivery platforms.
IBC honours the Met
Excerpts from La Bohรจme, The Magic Flute and Turandot added to the excitement of the evening. Mozart and Puccini were on the programme because the IBC International Honour for Excellence, the highest award that IBC can bestow, this year went to the Metropolitan Opera of New York City.
The Met made its first broadcast almost exactly 100 years ago, in January 1910. It has always used radio, then television, to bring great opera to a wider audience. In 2006 it launched a new venture, the transmission of operas captured in high definition television and transmitted to digital cinemas in the USA and around the world. To bring world-class opera to local communities in this way has demanded a unique commitment by cast, crew, technologists, engineers, producers and management.
“I guess we are a little surprised, being an ageing art form, to be winning a technological award, but we’re thrilled to be the recipients and we want to thank you, IBC,” said Peter Gelb, talking live from New York over an HD satellite link. “If not for the technology and engineering achievements and feats that your organisation embraces, we would never have been inspired to take the chance of transmitting our operas live in high definition to movie theatres and performing arts centres around the world.”
The award itself was presented to Mark Schubin, the engineer in charge of the Met’s technical team. He added “Thank you IBC. I can’t think of a better award I’d rather have.”
Using technology to find lost children
KLPD, the Netherlands Police, wanted to implement an Amber Alert service, the system that broadcasts information about lost or potentially kidnapped children. Rather than limit it to television, though, KLPD wanted to use every communications medium available to spread the message as wide as possible, as quickly as possible.
Dutch communications specialist Netpresenter stepped up to the challenge and, in a co-operative charity project, developed the functionality that the police wanted, a single point of access to push messages across all media, including online messages to individuals and businesses who have registered for the service to computers, as SMS and instant messages, website alerts and RSS news feeds.
To mark the importance and effectiveness of this work, IBC honoured it with a special award, presented to Carlo Schippers of the KLPD National Missing Persons Bureau.
“I’m happy, and honoured, that I was invited by IBC to be here to represent the Dutch national police, as well as the Dutch ministries of justice and the interior,” Schippers said. “From literally hundreds of cases of child abduction we have studied, we have learnt one thing that is of the absolute essence, and that is the time we have to react. Amber Alert has given us that advantage.”
Research and design
Other awards were presented as part of the ceremony. Honoured for the best technical paper in the IBC conference was Mark Waddell of BBC R&D for his timely paper, presented on Saturday morning, entitled Compatibility challenges for broadcast networks and white space devices.
The best stand designs in the exhibition โ as judged by a panel that walk all 11 halls and view a thousand stands โ also received awards. The prize for the best large stand went to Humax Electronics, with control surface specialists Tangent Devices taking the honour for small and medium free design stands.
Winner of the design award for the best use of shell scheme space was Broadcast Bionics.
A glimpse of the future
The IBC Awards Ceremony ended with a look ahead to what is certain to be an award-winner in the future. The audience was treated to a 16 minute extract of James Cameron’s new movie Avatar, which will be released at the end of the year.
Cameron, who won the IBC International Honour for Excellence in 2003, wrote the story of Avatar 14 years ago, but needed to wait for the technology to match up to his vision. In the new movie, his first since Titanic, this master storyteller, a pioneer of technique and technology, immerses his audience in a new world beyond imagination.
