EIDR has established a formal liaison agreement with the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) to work together on areas of common interest, including content authenticity and provenance issues, the groups announced.
The IPTC was established in 1965 by a group of news organizations including the Alliance Européenne des Agences de Presse (now NAA), FIEJ (now WAN), and the North American News Agencies (a joint committee of Associated Press, Canadian Press, and United Press International) to develop and promote efficient technical standards that improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries, and consumers.
“In the Venn diagram of media, there is significant overlap between news and entertainment interests in descriptive metadata standards, globally-unique content identification, and media provenance and authenticity,” said Richard W. Kroon, EIDR’s director of technical operations. “By working together, we each benefit from the other’s efforts and can bring forth useful standards and practices that span the entire commercial media industry.
“Our hope here is to find common ground that can align our respective metadata standards to support seamless metadata management across the commercial media landscape.”
According to Brendan Quinn, IPTC’s managing director, “The IPTC has been working on media metadata for almost 50 years. After communicating informally with EIDR on standards interoperability since 2018 when we published the first version of our IPTC Video Metadata Hub standard, we are pleased to formalize the relationship with an official organizational liaison agreement.”
EIDR’s primary focus is managing globally unique, curated, and resolvable content identification (which applies equally to news and entertainment media), via the Emmy Award-winning EIDR Content ID, and content delivery services, via the EIDR Video Service ID. In support of this, EIDR is built upon and helps promulgate the MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework (MDDF), a suite of standards and specifications that address core aspects of digital distribution, including identification, metadata, avails, asset delivery, and reporting.
To help address the increased concerns regarding deep fakes and other inappropriate applications of artificial intelligence (AI) with the potential to disrupt the commercial media ecosystem, EIDR established a Content Provenance and Authenticity committee and established a formal liaison relationship with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Naturally, this is also a significant concern for news media.
“With the IPTC Media Provenance Committee bringing C2PA provenance technology to the news industry, IPTC member organizations have a real interest in identifiers for media publishers and media content,” Quinn said. “We look forward to sharing ideas and best practices with the EIDR community, and to promoting our common needs to the media industry.”