Op-Ed: The Story Object Model for Sport? The Game Is Already in Play

A response to Mark Turner and the SVG AI Innovation Lab

SVG AI Innovation Lab Program Director Mark Turner's How Broadcast Sports Can Apply the Newsroom Story Model From the IBC Accelerator had us nodding along from the first paragraph. [Story Object Model] SOM 1.0 had been live for less than a fortnight when someone who knows sport picked it up, turned it over, and asked what it could do on match day. That's exactly what we hoped would happen when we gave it away.

Alex BassettThe Lab knows this ground. It has catalogued more than 90 AI projects across its member broadcasters, and its taxonomy lines up with SOM almost exactly: clip generation and storytelling, real-time graphics and personalization, data integrity and provenance. Mark puts it neatly: swap newsroom' for match day.' That's the swap we've been working on since March. A goal, an overturned call, a player in the tunnel: one moment of source video becomes a highlight, a social cutdown, a rivalry arc, and a feature. That's the problem SOM was built for, and sport has it as much as news does. There's a reason the heart of Mark's piece felt so familiar to us.

SOM Was Never Just for NewsSOM shipped as a news standard first, but it was never a news-only idea, and sport was never an afterthought. We kept the first proof to news on purpose, because a new idea needs one hard case done properly before it stretches. AP, NBCUniversal, ITN, and the BBC proposed the [IBC Accelerator] Smart Stories project, and Channel 4, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Sky, and ITV joined as champions. Many of them run sport as seriously as they run news.

Morag McIntoshAnd the three of us know sport. Between us, [we have] more than a quarter century in live-sport control rooms - Olympics, World Cups, Commonwealth Games, and many more - directing and TDing live sport, then designing automated sport production long before AI arrived. We also come from broadcasters that run sport, elections, and news on the same infrastructure.

We said at the IBC Accelerator's Kickstart Day in February that we were building one architecture for news, sport, entertainment, and beyond, and we've been working on the sport side since March. The question was never whether sport would follow. It was how.

One Family: SOM for Stories, EOM for Events

Our answer is SOM's companion for live events: the Event Object Model (EOM), now a 0.2.0 draft. It says what happened in a live event, when, and where it sits on the media timeline. Because it has its own definitions and validates with nothing else installed, a league, a graphics system, or a betting-data desk can run it without touching a newsroom standard.

Why a companion and not a copy? A game has a story, but it's a different kind of story. A news story has no shape until it's over. A game has its shape before a ball is kicked: a kickoff time, two halves, a clock, a score. So the event needs a model of its own. EOM holds what happens on the pitch. SOM holds the stories around it and whom they're told to. A highlight is where the two meet: a SOM asset pointing at an EOM moment.

Built this way, neither model has to bend. A league can use EOM without taking on a newsroom standard, and a newsroom never has to wait on a sports decision to change SOM. And, because EOM travels in the same envelope as SOM, one bus and one audit trail carry both.

Jon RobertsNone of this starts from scratch. IPTC's Sport Schema, the successor to the SportsML [standard], has been shaped by broadcasters and leagues for more than 20 years. EOM plugs into that work; it doesn't rebuild it.

EOM connects to other standards through junctions, which are optional links that say how two standards relate without either taking on the other's rules.

Media works the same way. TAMS, the Time-Addressable Media Store, lets every tool point at the exact seconds of a clip instead of copying the file. A goal, a replay, a new angle - each one is found by time. That suits sport, and TAMS is already heading there, with replay and live cloud production tools being built on it. We built SOM's TAMS junction with events in mind, and EOM uses it the same way. A moment names an asset and a span of time, and whatever store holds the media, TAMS included, finds it.

EOM holds the moment. SOM holds the meaning. TAMS holds the media. The crosspoint is where moment meets meaning meets media.

One Moment, Many Stories

Anyone who has worked in a sport control room knows how this goes. The director calls a replay, and everyone hears it at once. The replay operator cues it and rolls it. Graphics fire. The TD takes the transition, sound follows the pictures, cameras reframe, and the PA starts counting back. The commentators are already talking the viewer into it

EOM gives systems that same shared talkback, so that one moment on the pitch reaches every tool in the chain at the same time.

Most of what that needs is already a design rule in EOM 0.2.0:

Events are known in advance. Mark's point that kickoff is known a week out is exactly how EOM works. Events are set up days ahead, with rights and markets already in place.

Every feed is referenced. Every camera feed is referenced, and every moment is written to the bus, so any tool can use any angle.

Rights are built in. Rights windows and delayed markets sit on the event and are applied where an asset meets an outlet, so the same result can be held in one territory and live in another.

Every angle is tied to the moment. Each goal, save, or card carries its media: which asset, which span, what each angle shows.

The Overturned Goal

Mark's hardest case is also the draft's worked example, and all 13 example messages validate.

WHEN THE CHALLENGE THE LAB RAISED THE EOM ANSWER

Seven days out You know kickoff time a week out, which means a sports

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/10/06/op-ed-the-story-object-model-fo...
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