{"id":1688,"date":"2026-09-14T14:17:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T14:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uvotv.com\/blog\/?p=1688"},"modified":"2026-09-14T14:17:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T14:17:02","slug":"uvotv-highly-commended-at-the-csi-awards-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uvotv.com\/blog\/uvotv-highly-commended-at-the-csi-awards-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"UVOtv Highly Commended at the CSI Awards 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Amsterdam \u2013 September 12, 2026 <\/strong>\u2014 UVOtv was recognized with a Highly Commended award in the Most Innovative Product or Project category at this year\u2019s CSI Awards, presented at Hotel Okura during IBC 2026, one of the broadcast industry\u2019s biggest annual gatherings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cReceiving the Highly Commended award is a huge validation of what UVOtv set out to do \u2014 turn a market defined by piracy and fragmentation into a legitimate, sustainable home for diaspora audiences and the broadcasters who serve them,\u201d said Lionel Dreshaj, Co-Founder and CEO of UVOtv. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>UVOtv service runs on Setplex&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/setplex.com\/zapflex-2\">Zapflex video service platform<\/a>. 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 numbers that turn ad inventory nobody could previously sell into the monetizable free-to-view model viewers get today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The CSI recognition follows UVOtv\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/uvotv.com\/blog\/uvotv-wins-nab-show-2026-project-of-the-year\/\">Project of the Year win at NAB Show 2026<\/a> earlier this year \u2014 back-to-back recognition from two of the industry\u2019s most closely watched awards programs, and a sign that the model built around North America\u2019s diaspora communities is holding up under real scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>For media inquiries contact:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Jack Scarr<\/em><em><br><\/em><em>SVP Marketing<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>jack.s@setplex.com<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>+447763497171<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amsterdam \u2013 September 12, 2026 \u2014 UVOtv was recognized with a Highly Commended award in the Most Innovative&hellip;","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1690,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uvo-news","8":"cs-entry"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>UVOtv Highly Commended at the CSI Awards 2026<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"UVOtv earns a 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