The annual IBC Awards Ceremony underlined just how far electronic media has extended into our world, far beyond its origins in television. And the winners were...
IBC International Honour for Excellence—The highest award that IBC bestows went to the Metropolitan Opera of New York City. The Met, which made its first broadcast almost 100 years ago, in January 1910, 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 U.S. 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.
Top Innovation Award—Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) for its MENOS project, a multimedia exchange network over satellite. Developed by Newtec and hosted by Arabsat, MENOS handles all program exchanges between the 28-member broadcasters as data files.
Innovation Award for Content Creation—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.
Innovation Award for Content Management—Belgian state broadcaster RTBF for NumProd, a new digital workflow. This brings radio, television and online services into a single service-oriented approach.
Innovation Award for Content Delivery—ASBU for its MENOS project.
Best Technical Paper—“Compatibility challenges for broadcast networks and white space devices” by Mark Waddell of BBC R&D.
Best Stand Designs—The prize for the best large stand went to Humax Electronics; the prize for small and medium free design stands went to Tangent Devices. Winner of the design award was Broadcast Bionics.
The IBC honored KLPD, the Netherlands Police, with a special award for teaming up with Dutch communications specialist Netpresenter to develop an expanded version of an Amber Alert service. It features 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, Web site alerts and RSS news feeds.
The IBC Awards Ceremony closed 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 he immerses his audience in a new world beyond imagination.
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