London, United Kingdom – 9 November 2026 – Vizrt, the AI platform for visual storytelling, 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, AI agents included, 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. 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.
Jon Roberts
Chief Technology Officer at ITN and co-author of the Story Object Model.
Building from the success in Amsterdam
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. The change is then propagated to every connected system, and each output responds in a way that is editorially right for it: either automatically, waiting for an operator, or triggering an alert for further human decision.
In the Smart Stories project, judgement is made once, by a human; execution is graduated by output. SOM 1.0 is free to implement, with no membership or permission needed.
Open standards are essential in solving common industry challenges. The SOM project is a great example of how collaboration leads to innovative solutions for production professionals across the board, and through participation in the project, Vizrt is extending its ecosystem, while keeping interoperability and security as priorities.
Caroline Cardozo
VP Product Management, Vizrt
The specification’s authors are Jon Roberts, Morag McIntosh, Alex Bassett and John Boucklos. Jon, Morag and Alex conceived the model and led the project alongside Brian Hopman of AP. The project’s fourteen champions included ITN, the BBC, NBCUniversal, AP, Reuters, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, the EBU and SMPTE, and Vizrt was one of seventeen participants. Google Cloud was title sponsor, and Amazon Web Services provided the reference bus and media store.
Vizrt was the project’s graphics partner, with the proof of concept for the SOM integration delivered in Viz Arc, the augmented reality (AR) control system. The related graphics are designed and shown in Viz Artist and Viz Engine, the real-time 3D graphics rendering and compositing engine.
See it live at the AI Creative Summit in London!
On Wednesday, November 11th at 10:40am, Morag McIntosh, Head of AI at QTV, and Jon Roberts, CTO at ITN will present a live demonstration of the Story Object Model in room NFT2 (https://www.aicreativesummit.co.uk/).
