UVOtv Highly Commended at the CSI Awards 2026
Amsterdam – September 12, 2026 — UVOtv was recognized with a Highly Commended award in the Most Innovative Product or Project category at this year’s CSI Awards, presented at Hotel Okura during IBC 2026, one of the broadcast industry’s biggest annual gatherings.
The award reflects the AI ad-detection technology built into the service. It automatically detects and monetizes ad breaks across hundreds of international live channels that carry no SCTE-35 markers — the kind the industry had long treated as commercially unworkable. UVOtv changes that, shifting the economics for everyone involved. Diaspora viewers get free, legal access to television from home. Broadcasters get a way to finally monetize their channels in North America. Advertisers get direct reach into a 70-million-strong audience they could never target at scale before.
“Receiving the Highly Commended award is a huge validation of what UVOtv set out to do — turn a market defined by piracy and fragmentation into a legitimate, sustainable home for diaspora audiences and the broadcasters who serve them,” said Lionel Dreshaj, Co-Founder and CEO of UVOtv. “This recognition belongs to the whole Setplex team that built our proprietary AI ad-detection technology and the entire Zapflex platform, and to our broadcaster partners who trusted us to bring their channels to North America the right way.”
UVOtv service runs on Setplex’s Zapflex video service platform. The centerpiece is a proprietary, multimodal AI model that detects ad breaks across hundreds of international channels and inserts the SCTE-35 markers they lack — most of which never carried them, and none of which needed individual configuration or retraining to work with the system. It runs at 98% accuracy, classifies segments in under 500 milliseconds, and adds less than 10% to compute costs — numbers that turn ad inventory nobody could previously sell into the monetizable free-to-view model viewers get today.
A little over a year after its August 2025 launch, UVOtv counts 1.5 million monthly active viewers, and live content accounts for 97% of everything they watch.
The CSI recognition follows UVOtv’s Project of the Year win at NAB Show 2026 earlier this year — back-to-back recognition from two of the industry’s most closely watched awards programs, and a sign that the model built around North America’s diaspora communities is holding up under real scrutiny.
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