The annual International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) took place this weekend in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and it was as big as ever: tens of thousands of media technology professionals coming together to talk shop, meet old friends and contacts, and see the latest developments in media technology.

IPTC members were well represented, with attendees present from ABC Australia, Activo Consulting, Adobe, AFP, AP, Arqiva, BBC, Broadcast Solutions, CBC/Radio-Canada, EBU, Fotoware, Google, ITN, Limbo, Media Cluster Norway, Moments Lab, NHK, Reuters, Sony, Trufo, WDR, Yle – around half of IPTC’s members were represented in some way. Plus of course many of our partner organisations such as C2PA, the DPP, DMLA and NABA were also in attendance.

Topics ranged from AI agent-enhanced television production to microdramas and the creator economy to eroding trust in traditional media organisations and much more.

The IPTC’s Managing Director Brendan Quinn and many members of IPTC Working Groups attended the event this year.

Highlights for IPTC included:

• A breakfast event on retaining trust in media through media provenance, organised by Media Cluster Norway including presentations from CBC/Radio Canada, Fotoware, CuttingRoom, Mimir and
• Two C2PA meetups: one organised by the EBU at their stand, including presentations and demos from many C2PA participants including United Streaming, WDR, EBU, (see photo above) and another organised by Adobe, showing that C2PA proponents are even willing to get up early on a Sunday morning to meet up!
• The presentation of technical paper at the IBC Conference co-authored by Marcos Armstrong of CBC/Radio-Canada, Marianne Fjellhaug of Media Cluster Norway and Brendan Quinn of IPTC, with extensive input from the IPTC Media Provenance Best Practices & Implementation Working Group. The paper is entitled “A standardised framework for C2PA provenance in media workflows” and describes a model for describing media workflows that helps different stakeholders to come together. We will announce more about the paper when it is released to the public later this week.
• A standing-room-only presentation about the IBC Accelerator Incubator project Smart Stories featuring the Story Object Model, a project championed by Reuters, Associated Press, BBC and many others which involved training agentic AI to help with the story creation and editing process in a multimedia newsroom.

It was another great IBC. We were very pleased to participate and to meet with so many members, partners and friends of IPTC.