The Challenge:
Champions: BBC, Yle, RTE, ITV, IET, ITN, EBU, AP, ASBU, Channel 4, IPTC, Comcast, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Media Cluster Norway
Participants: CastLabs, Videntifier, Open Origins, Sony, Trufo, Tata Consultancy Services, Google Cloud
The Challenge:
Stamping and Recovering Content Provenance - A Last-Mile C2PA Toolkit with Additional Technologies
The original challenge set out by Champions BBC & ITN, in early 2025, was to develop open-source tools that enable organisations to integrate Content Credentials (C2PA) more easily into their workflows, use other technologies like digital fingerprinting and watermarking, and allow them to sign and verify media provenance. As interest in authenticating digital content grows, broadcasters and news organizations require practical solutions to assert source integrity and publisher credibility. However, implementing Content Credentials remains complex, creating barriers to adoption. This project sought to lower the entry threshold, making it easier for organisations to embed provenance metadata at the point of publication and verify credentials on digital platforms.
Kickstart Pitch:
PoC Results:
Project Goals:
The initiative aimed to create an open source ‘stamping’ tool that links to a company’s authorization certificate, inserting C2PA metadata into content at the time of publishing. It also sought to develop a complementary tool to decode and verify these credentials, ensuring compliance with C2PA standards. Fingerprinting and watermarking technologies were used to retrieve stripped C2PA manifests from video files during processing stages in a newsroom's workflow. By providing these tools, the project wanted media organizations to assert content authenticity, helping to combat misinformation and reinforce trust in digital media.
This work builds upon the "Designing Your Weapons in the Fight Against Disinformation" Accelerator of 2024, which mapped the landscape of digital misinformation. Importantly, 2025 phase focused on practical implementation, ensuring that organizations can start integrating authentication measures in real-world workflows. By fostering an open and standardized approach, the project supports the broader media ecosystem in adopting content provenance solutions that enhance transparency and trustworthiness.
PoC Results:
As a result of this project, a first version stamping tool was built and demonstrated at IBC2025, to sign and verify video files at the point of publication.
When C2PA information was missing, the demo successfully sought a past manifest via fingerprint and re-associated the C2PA information to the file. Viewers saw time-bounded validation of segments of the video file on playback, demonstrating a red timeline for raising issues, blue for validated video segments, and orange for video files that re-associated recovered C2PA information. These watermarks and fingerprints could be retrieved from databases or blockchain systems built by the participants.
What’s Next?
Looking ahead, the group aims to explore how to best package the POC as a plugin to the tools that newsrooms use most frequently and deploy participant technologies into the tooling. Live video broadcast stamping will also be explored, and the number of vendors and newsrooms involved are expected to expand significantly.
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