Objectives:
Inspired by the multi-award-winning success of earlier Accelerators that saw an Evolution of Control Rooms morph into intelligent AI Agents for Live Production, this brand-new consortium of global broadcasters and vendors aim to define an open standard for story context interoperability in live production.
Having previously conquered the gallery, this 2026 focus is on the full content chain, with newsrooms as the primary focus, from news gathering through to transmission, while preserving human editorial control. And while production AI is arriving fast, every vendor tool operates in isolation.
A newsroom's rundown system, MAM, graphics systems and planning tools each hold fragments of the same story without a shared understanding of editorial context. MOS connected these systems operationally, but nothing connects them editorially. The present-day result: producers spend more time re-entering context and correcting misunderstandings between tools than the tools save them.
This Incubator’s primary goal is to tackle that challenge and give AI agents across that chain a shared understanding of what a story is, what's happening, and what matters. Think MOS for the intelligent computing era: MOS connected your systems, which makes them understand each other.
This 2026 team will look to build a reference implementation to prove it works, demo real world use cases at IBC, and define a new open standard for story context interoperability that will enable AI-powered production tools to share structured editorial knowledge for the first time.
Innovation and Collaboration:
The groundbreaking innovation of this 2026 Incubator will be built with a talented, international consortium of over a dozen award-winning global broadcasters, news outlets and established vendors that will explore solutions and define a new open standard, the Story Object Model (SOM) that will define how story context is structured, transported, and consumed across vendor tools.
Alongside the specification, the project’s MVP will produce a Skills reference architecture that allows broadcasters to encode their editorial rules as portable, machine-readable configurations.
A live, multi-vendor demo of the team’s work will also take place at IBC in Amsterdam, that will showcase and prove how the standard works in practice across real production scenarios, including breaking news and planned coverage with agents running on SOM data supporting content creation.
The Incubator’s collocation and synergies will also deliver a three-tier integration guide, giving any vendor a clear path to adopt the standard with minimal engineering effort.