©Olympic Broadcasting Services, photo by Owen Hammond

IBC has announced that its most prestigious honour, the International Honour for Excellence (IHFE), will be presented to Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), recognising the company’s innovation in live sports production and its impact on the global broadcast industry, as IBC has claimed in a statement.

Additionally, it has unveiled the winners of Best Technical Paper award, recognising research into reducing interaction barriers for older viewers of internet-delivered TV.

IBC2026 will bring the global media, entertainment and technology community together at the RAI Amsterdam from 11–14 September, welcoming industry players from more than 170 countries.

International Honour for Excellence

This year, the IHFE highlights OBS’s impact on live sports production and broadcasting. Through developments in ultra-high-definition production, immersive audio, remote production workflows, artificial intelligence, cloud-based technologies and next-generation storytelling, OBS has been working on the way audiences experience the Olympic Games.

Yiannis Exarchos, OBS Chief Executive Officer, shares: “We are truly honoured to receive this award and sincerely thank IBC for this recognition. This distinction is a tribute to the passion, expertise and dedication of everyone at Olympic Broadcasting Services, whose work enables us to bring the Olympic Games to audiences around the world. It recognises our team’s commitment to innovation, excellence and service to the Olympic Movement, as we continually seek new ways to enhance the coverage and audience experience of the Games. We are especially proud to receive this award from IBC, whose role in bringing together the international broadcast community is so highly regarded”.

Best Technical Paper

Emma Maier, Jodie Pearton, Anna Stewart, Arina Mnatsakanyan and Jonathan Freeman, of i2 media research are being awarded the coveted Best Technical Paper at IBC2026. This award aims to recognise their work entitled ‘Measuring and reducing interaction barriers in internet-delivered tv systems through age-informed human factors design’.

The paper explores how internet-delivered TV can be made easier for older viewers so they can access everyday services with confidence. Using observational testing with adults aged 65–89 at the i2 media research lab at Goldsmiths, University of London, it identifies how design barriers including a lack of hierarchy, layered menus, unclear feedback and unfamiliar terminology can make everyday tasks harder than expected. It then demonstrates how a simple, optional age-informed overlay interface can reduce barriers and support more confident, independent viewing.

Andrew Dumbreck, Chair of the IBC2026 Technical Papers Committee, states: “Among many excellent papers in this year’s IBC Technical Conference, this paper on how to make TV more usable for older viewers clearly reports a well-conceived and executed scientific study. It is highly relevant to the current thinking about how to transition to greater delivery of content by internet while retaining public service goals of universal coverage and access. We can also look forward to a diversity of top-quality papers from the broadcast industry and academia including from: BBC, UK; NHK, Japan; RAI, Italy; and RTÉ, Ireland”.

The IBC2026 Technical Paper Programme brings together the technical media and broadcast community to consider what direction technology should take for the industry and features original research on solutions to real-world problems faced by the international broadcast and digital media industry. Its expanded scope this year includes papers dedicated to technical policy alongside traditional technical papers, with focused sessions spanning AI Production, Coding, Trust & Provenance, XR & Multiview, the Future of TV Distribution, Dynamic Media Facility developments and AI Indexing.

The IHFE and The Best Technical Paper will be presented at the IBC Innovation Awards event, which takes place Sunday 13 September at the IBC2026 Conference.