AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge 2026
The AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge 2026 brought 460 participants from charities, partners, students and AWS Solution Architects to three AWS offices for a 72-hour hackathon. Forty-nine teams worked alongside twenty charities to prototype AI-powered solutions to real accessibility and social-impact problems.
I led the delivery of the cross-three-site AV and livestreaming solution, connecting London, Manchester and Dublin at 1080p for real-time collaboration, with external public live streams so finalists at each venue could present to judges and attendees across the network.
Winners
- London: Bookmark Reading Charity
- Manchester: The King's Trust
- Dublin: Rehab Group
The event organising team received a Special Recognition Award from the head of AWS UK, Alison Kay.
Technical summary
Three-way 1080p full-duplex video bridge, live-switched directed output to a public YouTube destination, and locally mixed IMAG at each venue. Built on AWS Elemental Live and MediaLive for contribution, with MediaPackage for distribution. Sub-second glass-to-glass latency between sites for Q&A, and a monitored fallback path for venue uplink failures.