NHK’s 8K doc wins IBC Innovation Award
September 15, 2025
By Chris Forrester
A spectacular marine documentary, captured in 8K UHD by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, has won an IBC Innovation Award at the 2025 event.
NHK’s Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth, which successfully filmed the world’s-first video images of a group of coelacanths and their behaviour indicative of reproduction using 8K HDR and 22.2 multichannel surround sound, was selected as the winner of the Content Creation category. The project was a co-production between NHK, ZDF/ARTE and OceanX.
The IBC Innovation Awards recognizes the best in collaborative efforts to develop new solutions to real-world technical challenges and to address social and environmental issues. NHK’s coelacanth programme was nominated as one of the three finalists of the Content Creation category and the announcement of the win was made at the awards ceremony which took place at RAI Amsterdam on September 14th.
The new adventure aims at capturing a living fossil, the coelacanth. With D. Masamitsu Iwata and Dr. Kelly Sink aboard OceanX’s cutting-edge research vessel, the Deep Ocean team goes on a mission off the coast of Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. Measuring nearly two meters, the coelacanth has lived unchanged for 400 million years. Rarely found, these nocturnal deep-sea fish are shrouded in mystery. Utilising multiple submersibles, the team is not only successful in filming coelacanths in their natural habitat, but they successfully pull off a world-first, 72-hour continuous filming in the deep sea. And what the crew filmed of the elusive fish may help experts understand how life left the ocean to live on land.
This achievement was enabled by the development of innovative equipment and the use of spherically transparent submersibles, which provided a 340-degree panoramic view of the deep sea. Given the coelacanth’s low metabolic rate and extreme sensitivity to disturbance, the team designed two specialised 8K deep-sea camera systems. These systems allowed for extended filming durations with ultra-high sensitivity and ultra-high resolution, making it possible to document the elusive species in unprecedented detail.
On behalf of the production team, Yoshitaka Shiraishi, the Head of NHK’s Content Technology Center, commented: “The ultra-high-sensitivity, ultra-high-resolution 8K deep-sea camera and the 8K/22.2ch workflow were made possible through the combination of the knowledge of our valued technology partners and the technical expertise NHK has cultivated over many years. We are honoured that this achievement has been recognised not only within the broadcasting industry but also by coelacanth researchers both in Japan and abroad. We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone involved. Moving forward, we will continue to pursue the development of cutting-edge technologies and strive to deliver new and inspiring experiences to our audience.”
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