The Value of Content Provenance in the Media Landscape

Leaders in the media industry today have good reason to be seriously concerned about the pernicious effects of easily and rapidly generated fake news, manipulated variants of images and video assets, and lack of transparency and accountability for content on major distribution platforms. Much of this concern is currently being debated under the headline of innovations in AI, but fakery and deception have a much longer and darker history without the influence of such advanced technologies.

Meta recently announced that it had effectively thrown in the towel on policing any standards of factual integrity on its social media platforms. In such a landscape, challenges to any basic regime of trust could become overwhelming as malicious actors exploit the lack of verifiable sources. The danger, perhaps, is that fact-checking efforts, and the market value of creative media assets in general could be undermined without reliable source verification mechanisms.

A potential counterweight to this trend is the more active use of provenance. Provenance in the world of fine art and content provenance in digital media can usefully be related here, in that they both seek to establish the origin and authenticity of an asset. In the art world, claiming to have discovered a new canvas painted by Van Gogh means very little without being able to show that the work has provenance, which validates the history of an artwork’s ownership, exhibition, purchases, and sales.

Provenance in the digital media realm refers to the history of a piece of digital media, whether it’s an image, video, audio recording, or document. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) offers specifications for new media standards that can tackle the extraordinary challenge of trusting media in a context of rapidly evolving technology. C2PA enables authors of provenance data (at original creation, and at any subsequent stage of processing or editing) to securely bind assertions of such provenance to instances of content using their unique credentials.

Very importantly, the existence of a validated trail of provenance greatly impacts the potential value of the claimed Van Gogh—and can have the very same type of impact on the value of digital media assets. What’s the difference in how a consumer might perceive an authentic stream of The Lion King vs. a pirate version that has some scenes replaced with malicious messaging? There is a strong connection between the established value of a media asset and the security regime that protects that value.

The media industry must address these threats to its core health as a matter of urgency. It seems crucial that we should prioritize the development and adoption of content provenance practices to address the challenges and risks we face. This includes implementing technological solutions, fostering media literacy and critical thinking skills, encouraging transparency and accountability from content producers and platforms, and fostering collaborations among stakeholders to combat misinformation effectively.

It seems that at least three things must happen in parallel for this concept of digital provenance to have a significant impact on the challenges the media industry faces:

1. Digital content creators who value their business should employ tools that can mark outputs from the creative process with verifiable provenance metadata. Note that this does not preclude the use of AI tools to help generate any content, it would just make sure that some content can be recognized as coming from such a source during the creative process.
2. Distribution channels that we rely on for our information and entertainment must incorporate technology that will, by default, display the existence of provenance information (or lack of such metadata) for each and every asset that is displayed or played on their sites or apps.
3. Importantly, a cultural shift is required where consumers of content seek, or even demand, that they are able to check the provenance of a digital asset before they consume it. It seems unlikely that social media platforms, for example, will actually try and prevent the distribution of content without provenance information. But at least the users of such channels should have a very high expectation that they will be able to understand whether or not such information is available at the time they view that content.

It is not overstating the case to claim that the health of the media business in the coming years will rest on the extent to which content provenance becomes an organic part of our patterns of creation and consumption. The commercial value of services that deliver such trusted content can be significantly greater than those that do not. Linking a system of content provenance with the next evolution of digital rights management (DRM) should give content creators and rights holders better control over the protection and revenue potential of these particularly valuable digital assets.

This article is Sponsored Content

A View From the Top: EZDRM

At EZDRM, we emphasize a strong collaborative aspect to problem solving. Innovation and ease of use have always been hallmarks of our solutions for service operators. As the range of video applications and business challenges grows, we think that it is timely to re-emphasize those values within a more complete media solution architecture - an architecture that offers a sophisticated baseline for new services in conjunction with our industry partners.

06 Oct 2023