LiveU Joins IBC Accelerator Smart Stories Consortium to D...

LiveU is participating in the IBC Accelerator Incubator 2026: Smart Stories The New Knowledge Architecture for Content Production, an industry-wide initiative developing the Story Object Model (SOM), an open standard for structuring and sharing editorial story context across newsroom production systems. SOM creates one story that every tool works from cutting time to air, giving every team a single view, and preventing errors caused by rewriting metadata between vendors.

This new consortium spans more than a dozen broadcasters, news organizations, standards bodies, and technology vendors, covering the full content chain from news gathering through to distribution. Champions include ITN, BBC, AP (Associated Press), Al Jazeera, Channel 4, Washington Post, BBC, ITV, Sky, EBU, NBCUniversal, Reuters, Scripps, and SMPTE. LiveU joins the project alongside technology participants including Google Cloud, Shure, Trint, Cognizant, EVS, CUEZ, Trint, AWS, Nuvelics, Electric Sheep, the Weather Company, Moments Lab, HyperContent AI, Octopus, Fonn Group and Vizrt.

A gap AI cant close on its own

As content volume grows exponentially, broadcasters need better ways to discover and distribute it, and the ability to build one story into versions that span broadcast, social, and streaming. Today, producers hold that structure themselves, manually re-entering and aligning details. That slows production and raises the risk of error as stories advance toward air.

Smart Stories closes that gap with a new knowledge architecture for content production. MOS (Media Object Server), the broadcast industrys long-standing operational standard, connects systems by moving data between them but is editorially blind. In contrast, SOM is designed to connect them editorially: it gives every tool in the chain a shared, structured description of what a story is, what has changed, and what matters. AI agents and production tools can act on that understanding without a producer relaying it by hand.

The Accelerator project also defines Skills, so editorial standards, compliance thresholds and house style stay encoded and owned by the newsroom.

LiveUs role: a story-centric ingest workflow built around SOM

SOM extends LiveUs story-centric automated ingest and acquisition workflow by adding another layer of interoperability to LiveUs open EcoSystem. SOM enables editorial teams to share context in real time between vendors, leading to context-aware agentic workflows. LiveU Ingest today already shares live feeds and metadata with newsroom, editing, and distribution platforms outside LiveU.

Live production has always depended on context traveling from the field into the newsroom and across every tool that touches a story, said Roy Hasson, VP Product Marketing and SaaS Sales, LiveU. For years, producers held that context in their heads, as AI agents take on more of the production workflow, they need that same context to work from. Smart Stories is the industry building the standard that makes story-centric workflows possible, so systems understand each other and agentic AI can support the editorial process. Our field-to-cloud technology powers that work today.

One use case focuses on connecting acquisition units directly to the story. When a story breaks, LiveU suggests which unit to dispatch. That units feed carries the storys context into the cloud. Transcription and clip generation build on that context automatically. One person then confirms the story in a shared console.

Hasson continued, We are committed to open industry standards, because they increase collaboration and interoperability between vendors across the production chain. That commitment shows up in LiveUs active participation in initiatives like SOM, MXL, and TAMS open projects that keep our IP-video EcoSystem connected to outside tools and platforms.

Deliverables and live demo at IBC2026

The consortium will deliver three outputs before IBC2026 in Amsterdam, the Story Object Model specification, a Skills reference architecture and a live multi-vendor demonstration. The demonstration takes two forms: a filmed, end-to-end breaking-news pipeline, and a live event where a story changes mid-production, and every connected system responds in real time, with a human editor giving final sign-off. The consortium will also publish a three-tier integration guide, giving vendors a defined path to adopt SOM.

LiveU will join the consortiums live showcase on Saturday, September 12th:

Smart Stories Incubator showcase: 4:00 5:00pm, Future Tech Stage, Hall 14

Accelerator networking reception: 5:00 6:00pm, immediately following the showcase

Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice

LiveU is also participating in this second IBC2026 Accelerator Project, using open 5G network APIs to turn 5G from best-effort connectivity into a programmable, predictable and reliable production resource.

Network Control: Your Connection, Your Choice unites the BBC, EBU, DAZN, France T l visions, GSMA, RAI Italy, RTL Germany, TV2 Denmark, Vodafone and Telef nica as Champions, alongside LiveU, Neutral Wireless, Haivision, SliceFinity and Vonage as Participants, with the University of Strathclyde serving as Academic Partner. Together, the group explores how open network APIs can help applications with specialized requirements interact with standardized network capabilities designed to meet defined quality requirements, supporting reliable and business-critical media production workflows over 5G.

LINK:	https://kitplus.com/news/liveu-joins-ibc-accelerator-smart-stories-con...
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