I may be biased, but I think this IBC project may be the one thing people don’t want to miss in the sea of excitement that is #IBC2026. Trint will be joining a roster of renowned broadcasters and media vendors to share the outcome of months of collaboration on a project that could be game-changing for the media industry.
I’m not allowed to let you in on everything just yet - but here are a few details I can share of what we have been working on with leading news organisations like BBC, ITN, NBCU, Reuters and AP (as well as brilliant tech partners like LiveU, Fonn Group, Octopus Newsroom and others).
The project is all about trying to do for the ‘agentic AI’ era what the MOS protocol did for newsrooms in the 1990s – create a common language that lets diverse tech tools work together to deliver real value in news production environments.
You’ll get the chance to see some exciting demos with multiple vendors showing how they can work agentically on a live scenario, end-to-end – aiming to really show how this could work in real newsroom situations, helping to accelerate production and ensure guidelines and human-in-the-loop workflows are maintained.
This project is trying to create a standardised framework for newsroom tools to communicate and interact using something called the Story Object Model (SOM). It’s all about giving every tool along the whole newsroom production chain the story context and editorial guidelines they need to work together effectively.
The SOM would be a shared open format for that editorial context (as well as a skills architecture that makes things like editorial guidelines machine readable), which would allow multiple different vendors’ tools to work and act against the same story consistently, end-to-end. That becomes extremely powerful in a world of AI agents.
We wanted to be part of the IBC Accelerator because it just feels like necessary work that we wouldn’t want to miss being a part of. Our industry has been in a constant state of technological transformation for a while now, and of course the latest and biggest of these shifts is AI.
We need to make sure that we have people passionate about the industry defining the standards on how we use it effectively and in a way that won’t erode trust. We know we have value to add here.
Hear more about the Smart Stories project live on the Future Tech stage at 16:00 on Saturday 12th September, and meet Ale and Tessa on the Accelerator booth throughout the weekend. Watch this space for a full rundown of the panel discussion and the whole IBC weekend after the event.
See you in Amsterdam!
