IABM Awards Winners 2020

​“Aditya joined Digigram in 2018 as a product and digital marketing intern, while simultaneously pursuing his Master’s degree. Over the last two years, he has donned many hats within Digigram, starting out by laying down the structure of Digigram’s social media presence, followed by working as a junior product manager and then finally taking over the responsibility to expand Digigram’s business in Eastern Europe, Middle-East and Africa last year. In a year, he has enabled the company to extend its presence within these regions by mobilizing and training a strong network of partners and distributors.

“Despite moving to France as a 21-year-old who did not speak the language or have any connections in the country, he was still able to find a place for himself through sheer passion for learning new skills and building new relationships. This tenacity to work against the odds, his ability to learn from everyone around him and his willingness to self-correct, convinced us to put our trust on him to handle such a multi-cultural region and we are glad we did. This is also the same reason behind nominating him for this award."

"Aditya, within a year of taking over his new role, has reconnected Digigram with our contacts in the MEA region and established a very close relationship with them. Our partners in the region are now actively promoting and supporting Digigram more than they ever have before. In addition to engaging with our existing contacts, he has actively found new partners in different regions and motivated them to be enthusiastic about our brand and solutions. With extensive and elaborate product training, our partners are now confident in taking our solutions to markets beyond broadcast.

“He has incorporated the ‘think local, act global’ principle into his operations in the region and it has been showing great results so far. Apart from setting business targets and executing joint-prospection plans, he focuses a lot on building mutual trust and ensuring that Digigram’s brand is represented in the right manner: as a progressive, future-forward and approachable organization."

Nominated by DISH Mexico, Marketing Director Eduardo Peniche says, “latakoo provides the fastest and easiest solution to transfer large media files from any location. latakoo is an essential tool for production and broadcasters around the world who want to enable news, sports, production and other media teams in your organization to move content live fast.

“latakoo is the next generation in media delivery workflows. It compresses video, maintains quality and resolution, handles metadata and delivers media directly to systems at the station in the right house formats. A complete end-to-end media workflow solution that works in iOS, Windows and Android. latakoo core services include simultaneous compression and upload, download and transcode, transcription, custom metadata handling, social media publishing, collaboration and advanced workflow automation. Recently, latakoo introduced two new services – a time saving video editor enabling users to remain working directly in the cloud, and Manifest, an assignment tracker combined with a powerful indexing engine built to help broadcasters collaborate and repurpose stories across their organizations.

“latakoo is fully integrated with Avid Interplay, Grass Valley Stratus, Dalet Galaxy, Bitcentral and AP ENPS. It can also support custom network workflows that do not involve an asset manager.”

New to 2020, this award recognizes and rewards a significant digital campaign that has taken place during 2020.

To retain viewers’ and subscribers’ passion for sports and football in particular, beIN MEDIA GROUP’s departments worked around the clock along with its global offices in Singapore, London, Miami, Paris, Doha and Istanbul to create the first truly integrated creative global campaign curated for viewers and subscribers across 43 countries and in 5 continents. The campaign not only showcased how the entire world was affected by the pandemic, but it also provided hope and a sense of nostalgia to sport enthusiasts from Los Angeles, USA to Lyon, France all the way to Cairo, Egypt.

“Love it Like the First Time”, the first major international campaign by beIN SPORTS, was introduced for fans to celebrate the start of the new 2020/21 football season across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), Asia-Pacific, France, Turkey and North America.

The unifying and positive campaign celebrated a fresh start to football across the globe and included the best football leagues and competitions including the English Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, France’s Ligue 1, Italy’s Serie A, the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, UEFA Nations League, AFC Champions League, CAF Champions League and more.

She is a fabulous employee, a huge asset to our group and the company as a whole. Jackie is directly responsible for scoping, defining and coordinating both large and small Infrastructure systems that have a direct impact on the company’s technical capabilities and profitability. Jackie’s knowledge of broadcast and production IT systems is unparalleled; she is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge of how and why things function. She loves to share her knowledge and has been a guiding light to her colleagues and peers. In the past year, we’ve experienced many unforeseen changes to our daily working practices; these have affected all employees in one way or another. Jackie has worked tirelessly to make sure that all employees are able to function in their roles no matter where they are located. The ability for key operational teams to work remotely successfully was one of Jackie’s key objectives and she has made it not only possible but, in some ways, better.

“Jackie has spent most of this year working and coordinating global internal teams and external suppliers and vendors to architect an infrastructure ecosystem that will support the technical and operational aspects of the Tokyo and Beijing Olympic Games. Jackie did this with a great sharing approach and made everyone feel they were on the same journey together. The output of this project has been very successful; Jackie not only provided a world class solution she also created a real feeling of ‘team’ and has made everyone she worked with a little wiser and understanding of the inter-department needs to make such a project function. Jackie also has an ability to communicate effectively with all of her colleagues no matter what level and has a great and respectful relationship with them all.”

New to 2020, this award recognizes and rewards a successful virtual event that has taken place during 2020.

For the first time ever, the annual meeting of NFL franchises to select newly eligible players for the upcoming season was held via video conference as a result of worldwide travel restrictions. Instead of the planned spectacular live event in Las Vegas, all team selections took place virtually, with league broadcasting picks taking place from the commissioner’s basement as well as various other locations. This historic Draft was broadcast live by NFL Network and ESPN from April 23 – 25.

Freeman, Brady Belavek of SAV and engineer Dave Ragains of Show Machine were hired to handle all production communications between the NFL, the networks and all production staff. Freeman, along with Belavek and Ragains have been providing the communications solution for the NFL Draft for over a decade, but never in a virtualized setting.

Belavek said, “When the decision was made to virtualize the Draft broadcast, we were tasked to come up with a reliable and secure remote communications solution that would enable a large number of production staff to operate from their homes while still being able to communicate on the production intercom freely over many channels. What turned out to be one of the biggest challenges was managing ISP connections in individual’s homes and offices, not to mention the security requirements from the NFL, who were understandably concerned about cyber security threats.”

Nominated by Clear-Com, whose Eclipse^® HX digital matrix system along with LQ^®-R4W8 was the chosen intercom solution to support the large network of remote Agent-IC^® intercom app clients required for this broadcast.

“Graham’s advice and support as Vice Chair over the last nine years has been a tremendous asset to me personally and the wider IABM team,” said Peter White, CEO, IABM. “This honour is richly deserved not only for the unstinting contribution he has made to IABM over many years, but also in recognising his long and successful career in broadcast and media technology; Graham must be one of the best known and most respected people in the industry. I know many people around the business will be saying ‘great choice!’ on hearing this news.”

Click the links below to find out more about previous award winners

Historical Awards