BBC Sport and Can Communicate, along with Inition and Axis, are in the running for an RTS Innovation Award for their stereo 3D satellite broadcast of Rugby Live:Calcutta Cup.

The Raising the Bar category awards a technique, technology, production device or programme that sets a new “gold standard” of expectations.

The Rugby event, which took place in March 2008, is thought to be the first live test screening of an international sports event in 3D HDTV via satellite.

It is up against BBC Research & Development which is twice short-listed in this category for its High Frame Rate Television Experiment and Ingex Automated Tapeless Production.

In other categories, the BBC and BSkyB will go head to head in the Under the Bonnet Award category, battling it out with two very different technology developments.

BBC’s PNg (Portable Newsgathering Innovation) takes on the Sky+HD Guide for the trophy which recognises a significant advance in the way content is managed or transferred. BBC Research & Development is again also shortlisted for its contribution to DVB-T2 (Freeview HD).

In the User-Generated Content category KEO Digital, Mint Digital and Channel 4’s Landshare, which offers a solution for people who want to grow fruit and vegetables but have no access to land, are shortlisted alongside BBC Wales’ Digital Storytelling project created by Gareth Morlais and Karen Lewis.

The last award is the On Target Award which will see Advanced Text-To-Speech Technology from Ocean Blue Software go up against Magic Lantern and Studio Liddell’s Bugbears and Beamups from The Online Global News Marketplace.

The RTS Innovation Awards aim to recognise outstanding achievement in the development of new technologies in distribution, production, and manipulation.

Winners will be announced on Tuesday 10 November.