By rssfeeds-admin 
Vendors showed signs of concrete progress for the nascent specification known as “C2PA”—short for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity—at the IBC show in Amsterdam last month. Sony, which has been collaborating with the BBC on C2PA development, demonstrated a new camcorder, the PXW-Z300, which it bills as the first camcorder to embed digital signatures into video files. And Dalet and France TV gave a conference presentation on a proof-of-concept (POC) news workflow that is currently live at the French broadcasters, which is inserting C2PA metadata into OTT content that can then be viewed on a customized digital player.
But insiders say the exact parameters of C2PA still remain fluid. And there remains a fair amount of debate about how the new standard will actually be implemented at scale in professional media tools like cameras and editing systems.
Supporting Full Provenance
The biggest outstanding issue is whether C2PA-enabled devices will still fully support both “technical provenance” — indicating what cameras, editing and graphics systems were used in the creation of a piece of content such as a news story, and/or whether generative AI technology was used — as well as “editorial provenance,” which indicates who produced the story, such as a station, network or individual content creator. Supporting both would allow a viewer to scroll over the small icon — “CR” for “Content Credentials” — and open a graphical sidebar to display what C2PA describes as a “digital nutrition list” that shows all the ingredients in a piece of content.
The initial goal of C2PA was that the standard would include both technical and editorial provenance — hence its name. But with the rapid proliferation of generative AI-produced content over the past two years, increased emphasis in C2PA has been placed on technical provenance at the expense of identity.
Insiders say big technology firms have cited privacy concerns in pressing for the display of editorial provenance to now be optional, not mandatory, in C2PA-enabled software and systems. And that change is now reflected in an updated version of the C2PA specification. While C2PA Version 1.4, released in November 2023, made support for editorial identity mandatory, Version 2.0, released in January 2024, did away with that requirement. Subsequent releases in September 2024 and May 2025 have not reinstated it.
Editorial Concern
The change has broadcasters concerned. Engineers caution that whatever features vendors roll out in their first wave of C2PA-compliant devices in the next few years is likely to become the de facto standard. And if support for editorial provenance is optional then it isn’t likely to be included. That would remove much of the promise of C2PA for broadcasters.
“Anytime you make something optional in the process, others are not going to adhere to it,” says Ernie Ensign, AVP of news technology for Sinclair. “And identity is absolutely critical for us, so we’re pushing on that. And there are other broadcasters who also believe that that is critical. So that is our position — that identity has to be part of this whole spec, or it has no use for us.”
The concern extends beyond broadcasters to global news organizations and independent content creators, says Rebecca Hanson, director general of the North American Broadcasters Association, who described identity as a “core value” of C2PA.
“Eliminating identity from the standard defeats the original purpose of content provenance authentication, which is to assure the public that content is presented as it was originally captured without unauthorized adulteration,” Hanson says. “Identity data is therefore essential for content creators. For news organizations, it supports trust in their audiences. It helps internal archive management by identifying what a newsroom owns. And it empowers content creators to withhold consent from AI training platforms.”
Myriad Seats At The Table
Disagreement about the direction of the C2PA standard is perhaps unsurprising given the complicated genesis of the initiative itself. C2PA was formed in 2021 by the combination of two different efforts aimed at fighting inauthentic content. One was the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), founded in 2019 by Adobe with an initial focus on establishing technical provenance in still photographs; it now counts 5,000 members. The other was Project Origin, formed in 2020 by the CBC, BBC, New York Times and Microsoft with a focus on both editorial provenance and technical integrity in video. It now includes Media City Bergen and the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) as key members.
Neural Transform principal Bruce MacCormack, a former CBC executive who is now consulting for the CBC as its representative to the IPTC, says it made sense for Project Origin and CAI to join forces to “do it once and do it right” when it came to tackling fake content.
“And at that point we brought in all sorts of other people to grow the party,” says MacCormack, who adds that C2PA has implications outside of broadcasting including the advertising and insurance industries.
C2PA is organized under the nonprofit Joint Development Foundation, which is aimed at creating open standards and is itself part of the Linux Foundation. As such, a number of the world’s biggest technology companies have joined the effort alongside leading media companies and ad agencies. C2PA steering committee members now include Adobe, Amazon, BBC, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Publicis Groupe, Sony and Truepic.
With so many different players in C2PA, finding consensus can be difficult, says Hugo Gaggioni, CTO for the Imaging Products and Solutions Americas Professional Group of Sony Electronics.
“The problem is that, depending on who you talk to, everybody has a completely different set of requirements,” Gaggioni says. “They want everything in the kitchen sink, in the standard, from the get-go. It takes a long time to get even a rudimentary set of tools that everybody can agree to.”
Gaggioni notes that with the advent of very high-resolution displays it is easy to create a rendering of an object, put it on a display and take a photograph of it, and think the resulting image is real [in simple terms this is how virtual production, such as used on Disney’s “The Mandalorian,” works]. So, Sony developed proprietary technology that analyzes the depth of the image which its camera sensors are capturing in order to determine if the object is actually real. If so, it then embeds a digital signature certifying the content as authentic.
Waiting On MXF
The C2PA technology was first rolled out in Sony’s Alpha DSLR still cameras and has now been adapted for video with the PXW-Z300 handheld camcorder. But Gaggioni says that today the Z300 is only able to certify video files in the MP4 format commonly used for proxy videos and streaming applications, not the MXF professional format that is commonly used as a file wrapper in broadcasting. He says while the camera records both formats in memory, Sony is still waiting on SMPTE to set rules for how high-res MXF files can be certified as C2PA-compliant.
The C2PA workflow at France TV is also currently based on MP4 for the same reason. Dalet VP of Product Management Mathieu Zarouk says that MP4 suffices for the current OTT application.
SMPTE is currently tackling MXF in C2PA through its study group on Content Provenance and Authenticity (CPA), which recently sent a survey to broadcasters, cinematographers and other end users to get information on the requirements they would like met. Once the structure for MXF certification is set, Sony will be able to support it in the Z300 through the purchase of an additional software license, Gaggioni says.
Sinclair has already committed to buy several PXW-Z300 units, Ensign says. While the group hasn’t taken delivery yet, his understanding is that MXF C2PA support is one of several features, along with HEVC encoding, that isn’t immediately available in the new camcorder but will be in the future through a firmware upgrade. He says that may take some time given the usual pace of the SMPTE standard process.
BBC Principal R&D Engineer Judy Parnall says the new Sony camera does support C2PA in the form of technical provenance, by certifying that it was shot on a live Sony camera. But that is the limit of its capabilities for now; there is no other provenance information. Haggioni says Sony plans to offer identity information in some form to its broadcast customers as an optional service in the future.
Parnall agrees with other broadcasters that supporting editorial provenance in C2PA is important but emphasizes that there also needs to be a mechanism to redact identity information, including geolocation data, when necessary, in order to protect sources or journalists working in war zones.
“We’ve always said, you need to be able to redact,” Parnall says. “So, actually making it mandatory in some ways throws up as many problems as making it optional.”
She said the BBC and other media companies have been actively pursuing “an industry-agreed way to include organizational identity,” with key stakeholders gathering at a “Media Provenance Summit” in Bergen, Norway late last month that was organized by Media Cluster Norway, BBC, the EBU and IPTC to discuss the implementation of C2PA in real-world newsroom workflows. She is hopeful of formal consensus being reached soon.
Fixing It In Post
MacCormack, who leads IPTC’s media provenance committee, acknowledged that some broadcasters would love to have C2PA metadata start in the camcorder, extend throughout the production process and persist through distribution to a consumer’s screen. But given financial, operational and technical realities, he says a more segmented approach may be in order.
“We’ve always got that glass to glass as the ultimate goal,” MacCormack says. “Photons hitting a light sensor in a camera all the way to the screen putting the image on for your eyes is the area that they want to be able to control. But the value out of C2PA happens at individual steps in that process as it’s going through that voyage.”
One of those big areas of value is serving as an additional fact-checking tool for journalists, by rooting out fake content at it is ingested into the newsroom. Including editorial provenance also creates internal efficiencies inside big organizations like the CBC as content is shared between bureaus and stations where staffers may not be familiar with each other. And then of course there is significant value on the output side, MacCormack says, in “making sure that no one hijacks your brand and all of your corporate values and gives credibility to something that isn’t really true.”
Both MacCormack and Parnall think most of C2PA’s goals can be achieved by certifying content after initial capture at the camera, either during editing or at what Parnall calls the “point of publication,” whether that is an output to linear broadcast or digital distribution.
“It’s totally technically possible,” MacCormack says. “The issue is, I think, more a maturation of the journalistic process. You have to start thinking about how you edit metadata, the same way that you edit the visual images that are on the screen, and to recognize that you’re going to be sending out a data package as well as a media package.”
That post-production approach makes sense to Hearst Television VP of Broadcast Technology Joe Addalia, who has been following the industry’s content authentication efforts since Hearst Corporation made an early investment in visual verification firm Truepic. He noted that Hearst’s 10-year-old Sony ENG camcorders don’t support C2PA, and while the group is now refreshing those, the new shoulder-mount Sony cameras it’s buying don’t have C2PA either.
“Our cameras don’t do it,” Addalia says. “And then the other thing you have to think about is a lot of the video that goes into a news package might not come from the camera, it might be archive, it might be from CNN, etc. So, if you package the metadata in [Adobe] Premiere, the other opportunity that you have as a local news organization is the attribution of that metadata can be done by either your newsroom, your WCVB Boston newsroom, or it could be by the individual reporter. It could be the reporter’s name in the metadata, such as, ‘This person certifies that this was accurate.’ I think there’s an opportunity for us to get into this world at that stage.”
One of the IPTC’s key tasks is to maintain a “trust list” of verified news organizations that will have access to a C2PA 2.0-compatible “Origin Verified Publisher Certificate” that lets them securely create a cryptographic seal on their content. The signing certificates will be issued by the IPTC to broadcast, print and digital native media publishers, who will then be able to stamp individual pieces of content as authentic.
“What we want to be able to do is say this broadcaster signed this piece of content,” MacCormack says. “All we’re really looking at is where does that signature live in the data packages and manifests that are being built, and then how are identities expressed in terms of the user interface.”
The post Content Authentication Initiative C2PA Hits Some Bumps In The Road appeared first on TV News Check.
Discover more from RSS Feeds Cloud
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.