Fraunhofer IIS receives EMMY® Award for its JPEG XS high-quality, low-latency video codec

September 03, 2025 -- Erlangen, Germany / North Hollywood (CA), USA -- The Fraunhofer-Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is excited to announce that its moving picture technology experts receive the world-famous Emmy® Award for engineering, science and technology for its JPEG XS video codec. This forward-looking standard for professional video production pushes the boundaries of high-quality transmission over IP for a wide variety of applications in media and studio technology and streamlines real-time video processing in data centers.

For 77 years, the Television Academy has annually awarded the prize for technical innovations in the US-American television industry. On October 14, at this year’s ceremony, Prof. Dr. Siegfried Foessel, Head of the Moving Picture Technologies Department at Fraunhofer IIS, will accept in North Hollywood, CA the Emmy statuette on behalf of the entire team. The award honors the development of JPEG XS and its implementation in products for future-oriented workflows in the media industry.

"This development once again demonstrates how Fraunhofer technologies drive market-ready innovations that significantly enhance the transfer of technology to business, industry, and society through international standards,” says Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. “I’m thrilled that our research has been honored with this prestigious award, which holds great esteem in the media industry.”

“We tried to fit an elephant through a keyhole,” jokes Siegfried Foessel. “The motivation for us was to find a way for TV studios and post-production companies to overcome limitations such as transmission bandwidth or the multitude of different formats and devices used in the industry. We tried to keep high-resolution video data as small as possible and to make transmission over standard Ethernet as fast as possible without losing quality. So, we meet the high requirements of professional productions.”

The JPEG XS team at Fraunhofer IIS developed the standard as an extremely powerful codec for high-quality, visually lossless video transmission while keeping its complexity as low as possible. This allows even 8k production images to be transmitted over IP during live broadcast. The JPEG XS software solutions based on the Fraunhofer IIS JPEG XS SDK are gaining traction in professional media devices, cameras, and workflows – from studio to post-production and live broadcast. JPEG XS can be licensed and integrated into a variety of hardware devices and software tools.

“Our teams at Fraunhofer IIS are well-known for audio and media technologies that revolutionize the way we produce and experience media content today. Our audio codecs mp3 and the AAC family including our latest xHE-AAC have been shaping the globally deployed standards and technologies used in almost all consumer electronic devices, computers and mobile phones. The more we are now delighted about the Emmy Award for the groundbreaking JPEG XS video codec for production workflows. We look forward to welcoming back the delegation with the Emmy in their hands to celebrate the team’s achievement together,” says Prof. Dr. Bernhard Grill, Director of Fraunhofer IIS.