LONDON—Vizrt has built a proof-of-concept integration with the Story Object Model (SOM), shown at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam as part of the Smart Stories Accelerator project.
Live production tools, such as a rundown system, media asset management and graphics, hold fragments of the same story without a shared understanding of its editorial meaning. SOM addresses this by giving every tool in that chain, including AI agents, the same live account of what a story is about, what's happening and what has been confirmed or held.
“Systems have long shared the rundown and the media,” Jon Roberts, chief technology officer at ITN and co-author of the Story Object Model, said. “For the first time, the story itself becomes a first-class object they can subscribe to, with its editorial state, lifecycle, compliance position, sources and relationships to other stories. That means every tool that speaks SOM works from the same story, updated the moment it changes. Confirm a figure once and the ticker can follow. Hold a fact on legal advice and the graphic carrying it knows before anyone puts it to air.”
Smart Stories was an IBC Accelerator 2026 incubator project. Its hurricane demonstration followed a breaking news story from end to end across a story context bus.
The story is live from the first wire alert—before any footage exists—and every connected tool subscribes to it. When something changes, a person confirms it once. That update is then propagated to every connected system, with each output responding appropriately: updating automatically, waiting for operator approval or triggering an alert for further human review.
In the Smart Stories project, a human makes a judgment once, and execution is graduated by output. SOM 1.0 is free to implement with no membership or permission needed.
The specification’s authors are ITN’s Roberts; Morag McIntosh, head of AI at QTV; Alex Bassett, vice president of Innovation at NBCUniversal; and John Boucklos, director of data innovation at NBCUniversal.
Roberts, McIntosh and Bassett conceived the model and led the project alongside Brian Hopman, vice president and general manager of workflow solutions at Associated Press. The project’s 14 champions include ITN, BBC, NBCUniversal, AP, Reuters, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, the EBU and SMPTE.
