Manifold technologies has been recognised as a key contributor to the Media eXchange Layer (MXL), which itself won the Content Creation category at the IBC2026 Innovation Awards. The award was presented on the main stage of the IBC Conference at the RAI Amsterdam on Sunday evening, with technical partners receiving a certificate to display on their own booths, as the company has claimed in a statement.

Designed to facilitate video, audio and timed data handover across shared memory, MXL was recognised for its technical achievements – including compute efficiency, infrastructure complexity, and the delivery of distributed, live, low-latency content – and for its aim to facilitate multi-vendor collaboration.

The solution uses open-source code under a permissive licence, meaning developers are free to build directly on the supplied code rather than implementing a specific written specification. By adopting this approach, the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) – the body that conceived and implemented the project – looked forward to prioritising interoperability.

For this, a range of industry stakeholders needed to be brought into the project from an early stage, providing insight and feedback on how MXL’s core features functioned in the context of individual vendors’ operations, both individually and collaboratively. EBU members – including CBC/Radio-Canada, BBC, France Télévisions, SVT and VRT – were involved from the outset, while broadcasters including Sky, NRK and Warner Bros, and vendors including Intel, Qvest, Sony, Ross and Matrox, were asked to contribute knowledge, feedback and code where relevant.

Manifold was also approached at the outset of the project, through EBU member CBC/Radio-Canada. After generating initial feedback in the early days of the initiative, manifold has since participated in the project’s Slack channel across the years, contributing particularly to discussions on internode communication, and has taken part periodically in Requirements Council Zoom calls and specific working sessions.

As an evolving initiative, the company is looking to potentially contribute code to aid FPGA acceleration support where it is needed, and interoperability demonstrations will form a major element of manifold’s presence at upcoming industry exhibitions.

Aleksei Shevchenko, Ceo of manifold technologies, comments: “Being recognised alongside so many industry leaders is a privilege, but the real achievement is what MXL represents: vendors who compete elsewhere choosing to solve a shared problem together. That’s the spirit that moves the industry forward. We’re proud to have contributed to the conversation, and we’re committed to deepening our involvement as the project evolves – particularly around FPGA acceleration, where we believe we can add real value”.