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As interest in authenticating digital content grows, broadcasters and news organisations need practical ways to assert source integrity and publisher credibility. This is particularly important as AI-generated media - video, still images and audio - is becoming more common and more convincing. That makes it harder for journalists to distinguish between what is real and what is synthetic.

As a founding member of the , ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Research & Development has been working for several years with many partners to develop standards for Content Credentials to confirm the origin of the media people consume every day.

Our work is now focused on implementing Content Credentials in the news ecosystem. However, integrating the technology into news workflows is complex at scale, which creates a barrier to adoption, despite many news organisations being keen to test and evaluate whether they should use them.

In 2024, the &²Ô²ú²õ±è;³¦²¹±ô±ô±ð»å&²Ô²ú²õ±è;‘’ explored digital misinformation and the current approaches being used to tackle it, including provenance and watermarking.

Building upon that work, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ R&D and  set the challenge for a 2025 IBC Accelerator, â€˜â€™. This year’s challenge seeks to make adoption easier, developing open-source tools that make it simpler for organisations to sign and embed provenance metadata when publishing and verify the provenance of media. A number of organisations joined us, with both news providers as champions (including , , , and ), and technology providers (such as , , , , and ) taking part.

Together we are creating an open-source â€˜stamping’ tool that performs a digital signature using a company’s certificate, inserting C2PA metadata into content at the time of publishing. The group has also developed a complementary open-source plug-in to decode and verify these credentials, ensuring they meet C2PA standards. We’re focusing on practical implementation, making sure organisations can start integrating authentication measures in real-world workflows. By providing these tools, the project lets media organisations start to assert content authenticity, helping to combat misinformation and reinforce trust in digital media.

The Accelerator also tested the combination of Content Credentials with fingerprinting and watermarking technologies. This shows that if credentials are stripped out when processing the media (a possibility until they roll out across the whole workflow and across distribution networks), they can be restored using these technologies.

The move toward creating, signing, and verifying content with C2PA is real. Devices are already on the market for still images and identifying AI, and we now start to see a focus on video too. We’ve shown the credentials appearing at both the ingest and publishing stages, and so as part of the Accelerator programme, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ R&D worked with Sony to sign material in the content acquisition stage. This extends our previous tests into video.

Using a pre-release version of , which was announced in July 2025, we had one of the world’s first use cases of testing the C2PA workflow with video footage for the IBC Accelerator. , supporting the C2PA standard for content authentication and addressing the growing need for verifiable media. By checking the credentials, users can see whether a video was captured by a real camera, who published it, and if it has been manipulated.

We filmed a demo with ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News’ AI correspondent Marc Cieslak showing how AI can deceive viewers and how C2PA helps verify authenticity. Using , we combined real footage with AI-generated backgrounds, showing how easily synthetic content can be created. However, with C2PA support, users can identify manipulations and make informed decisions about the media they consume.

This work creates tools for our journalists, giving them more ways to examine the provenance of material that comes into the newsroom. It allows the public to see where it comes from and whether it’s real or AI-generated.

Parts of the ecosystem still need development, but we hope to see widespread adoption over time. This is typical with standards that could affect so many established processes. However, integrating credentials is becoming a real, practical possibility - certificates are available, and organisations can now test them for themselves and with audiences.

Our collaboration with Sony marks another significant step towards a future where we can trace digital content back to its original source, ensuring transparency and trustworthiness. We will continue to work with our partners in different industry groups to refine and promote the adoption of C2PA standards for the entire ecosystem and for all media types, including live video, to make them a reality.