Content Credentials breaks through but can it achieve industrial scale?

IBC

The C2PA-created open standard has reached a significant level of support and adoption, but there remains work to do before it fully delivers

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Multiple organisations including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Amazon have pledged support for the open standard created by the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), an initiative selected by Time magazine as one of their 'Best Inventions of 2024'.

“The Advent of Generative lit a fire under C2PA because it was one of the few things that could really help people understand where content was coming from,” says Charlie Halford, Principal Research Engineer of the BBC which was one of the architects of C2PA (called Project Origin) back in 2018. “We've now hit a level of adoption where it's rolling without us needing to push it.”

As of November there are 4000 members of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), co-founded by Adobe, which backs the C2PA technical specifications to detect or label AI-generated material.

Yet there is still a lot of work to do. In the area of news, which is one of the primary targets for AI-driven misinformation, no broadcaster has yet implemented C2PA. That includes the BBC.

“It's still in trial phase at the BBC,” says Halford. “We are looking across lots of different workflows to see which have the most value because we want to make sure anything we do is going to be valuable to our audience.”

Implementation of C2PA is not without cost which has made broadcasters reticent.

“It’s an ongoing piece of work and it’s not perfect,” Tami Hoffman, Director of News Distribution and Commercial Innovation, ITN told IBC365. “It requires the good faith of actors right the way through the process. It would need a lot of upfront resource in terms of hardware, as well as additional resource to implement it throughout an entire newsroom's workflow. This is holding a lot of newsrooms back.”

A lot of the BBC’s research is into working out how it can implement C2PA into workflows at the lowest cost.

“There’s a big chain of editing [in producing content for news output] and to get every editing step C2PA compliant would be a large cost at the moment because the industry is only just starting, to implement this,” says Halford. “What we're hoping is that over time most of the products involved in your editing journey are going to support C2PA without you even needing to spend any money at all.”

Currently, few editing tools vendors have implemented C2PA into their software meaning that broadcasters would have to do this themselves. In addition to which every news broadcaster workflow is unique so a degree of customisation is required.

“We've got some custom software in our chain and the only person who's going to be able to change that is us,” he says.

There are also extra costs involved in data verification. Halford explains, “A news room has a lot of content coming in but are you wanting to put all of that out? For example, if you get a piece of content from the field with the precise GPS attached to it, we don't always want to share those exact location coordinates.”

Camera teams or contributors with phones might need protecting in war zones for example. “We might want to prevent those going through and that would be an individual decision which would require a some more editorial work. Where we are now is that parts of the industry have popped up to support C2PA. You need to choose the bit that works for you.”

A prime example is Adobe Photoshop. Since the software already supports C2PA users can start working with Content Credentialled metadata in this part of their workflow.

“One of the great things is that C2PA is an open source library that's freely available and cuts out a lot of that implementation effort. If we want support from glass to glass then all major editing vendors need to be supporting C2PA in some way.”

Updating equipment already in the field with C2PA is relatively straightforward for tools like media asset management, NLEs or smartphones with online operating systems. Not quite so easy for cameras.

“You've got this very fixed hardware platform that doesn't change very much. It's not like a mobile phone that receives updates frequently.”

Sony has managed it with a firmware upgrade for its Alpha range of stills cameras for photojournalists and news agencies. This certifies the authenticity of an image at the point of capture and creates a ‘digital birth certificate’ that is retained throughout revisions. The signature contains depth information that can show if the image captured was of an actual 3D object, vs a photograph of an image or video, providing an extra level of protection and ​ even more assurance of the content’s authenticity, according to Sony.

Nikon, Leica and Canon have also signed up to C2PA. Nikon has promised to add C2PA in a firmware update to is Z6III camera. However, it is the potentially more problematic issue of verifying user generated images and video from mobile phones which concerns news producers.

The backing of Google is crucial in this regard. It is exploring ways to relay C2PA information to viewers on YouTube when content is captured with a camera, and to embed C2PA into the Android OS for capture at source.

Google states: “While we know there’s no silver bullet for all content online, working with others in the industry is critical to create sustainable and interoperable solutions. That’s why we’re also encouraging more services and hardware providers to consider adopting the C2PA’s Content Credentials.”

Halford says, “I feel we already have a fairly large set of manufacturers in the professional photography sector. The much larger volume is user generated content so having somebody like Google on board is really helpful because they've got Android and the Pixel phones so we're hoping we'll see something around that.”

Microsoft has also embedded C2PA into its flagship tools, such as Designer and CoPilot, ensuring that all AI content created or modified remains traceable. The BBC is particularly interested in publishing on LinkedIn since the Microsoft platform now supports C2PA.

Amazon is also working to incorporate Content Credentials in AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video processing service that transcodes content for broadcast and multi-screen delivery at scale. This will allow news organisations and sports broadcasters to determine the provenance of media they are sharing and their distribution partners and news aggregators to verify the content’s authenticity before posting it on their platforms.

With all the main Cloud vendors (Google, AWS, Azure) and social media platforms (TikTok, Meta) working with C2PA the glaring omissions are X and Apple. The former might continue to see content credentials as a form of censorship while the latter is always highly protective of anything external to its ecosystem that it can’t control.

“It’s important to note that you don't have to join C2PA officially to implement it,” says Halford. “We've seen lots of people implement it entirely in their own way and suddenly launch.”

One piece of research Halford is doing at the BBC is reuniting content found off platform. This is where a news story producer is pulling information from a variety of sources including UGC images from phones pulled from existing media websites.

“Most of the time it’s fairly harmless. Maybe somebody sees a new story and they just add a little bit of context of their own or a comment on it. Sometimes it can be quite damaging when people take existing content and change the context to tell their own story. In those situations we'd like to use C2PA to bridge to that content to help consumers spot genuine from fake material and give them the original context of a piece of media.”

Another adjacent piece of work is with the International Press Telecommunications Council IPTC. Earlier this year the IPTC launched a Verified News Publisher programme   which allows news organisations to register to get their identity checked. Once their ID has been verified, they can get a certificate, which gives consumers assurance that the content certifiably comes from the organisation they have chosen to trust.

Other organisations like Intel, Arm, Truepic and Qualcomm represent a broad cross-section of industries committed to adopting C2PA standards and ensuring content authenticity across the digital ecosystem. It’s why Content Credentials has now become an industry in its own right.

“Content credentials apply across industries not just news media,” says Halford. “Truepic, for example, a member of the C2PA board, are heavily interested in the insurance industry and using techniques to verify insurance claims.

Looking forward to in 2025 we’ll see increased vendor adoption across. One of the main things we'd like to see is increased adoption at the BBC and in the platforms where content being distributed. We've seen it on LinkedIn, we know Meta are looking at C2PA and you never know, maybe X might be interested in doing something. That would be fantastic to see.”

Attending the recent Origin media provenance summit, was Tim Forrest, Content Editor at ITN who was also involved in the IBC Accelerator, Design Your Weapons in the Fight Against Disinformation.  “I think we are on the edge of something big here,” he said. “We have never had a way of being able to tell the origins of our videos and our pictures. C2PA promises that but there is work to do before it delivers. So we’ve got a decision to make. Are we in or out? Do we push on or pull back? I came away from the summit with a glimpse of what we - as news providers - could achieve if we collaborate around this. The decision is for all of us.”