Romuald Rat, Director of TechLab & AI
In a context where disinformation and deepfakes are severely eroding public trust and destabilizing democracies, France Télévisions has taken a decisive step by becoming the first broadcaster to systematically adopt the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) protocol on a daily basis. This initiative marks a turning point in public media’s involvement in information transparency and the fight against digital content manipulation.
Editorial commitment
France Télévisions places reliability and transparency at the heart of its public service mission. The adoption of C2PA is part of this approach, offering a concrete technological solution to strengthen public trust in digitally distributed news content.
The C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) protocol was developed by a consortium of major digital and media players including BBC, Radio Canada, The New York Times, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google.
These entities and others, including France Télévisions, are collaborating on the development and promotion this standard that allows the integration of cryptographically signed metadata into digital files to indicate their origin and modification history.
For us, the objective is clear: to eventually ensure that all news content distributed on digital platforms and social networks is accompanied by a certification of authenticity. This marking will enable audience members to know the provenance of a given
piece of media content and verify that it has not been transformed or manipulated.
Alexandre Kara, who is the Director of Information at France Télévisions, emphasizes the trust factor: “It is important that media, especially public media, concretely engage in using this protocol. The transparency approach is essential to maintain our audience’s trust.”
Experimentation to industrialization
The path to operational and global adoption of C2PA is not without challenges. France Télévisions conducted in- depth work for six months to demonstrate the feasibility of automating the marking of its news content. This experimentation phase was crucial to identify the technical and operational issues related to integrating the protocol into existing production flows.
We developed a proof of concept (PoC), in partnership with Dalet, to automate the C2PA process. This involves handling news content immediately after editorial validation, automating all C2PA protocol processes, and adapting our digital news platform player to ensure compatibility.
The established process includes several key steps:
- Ensuring an appropriate metadata flow between different systems, including product asset management and the newsroom computer system, guaranteeing that the signing process has access to all necessary data.
- Integrating essential metadata (journalists’ names, footage sources, etc.) into the C2PA manifest.
- Cryptographically signing each media file with an identity certificate to certify France Télévisions as the content source.
- Adapting the news platform player to validate and display C2PA metadata, allowing the public to verify content authenticity directly from the media.
This experimentation phase, with a rigorous technical approach, allowed us to better understand the steps that were already achievable, identify current technological barriers, and prepare the ground for large- scale implementation.
Progressive adoption
Based on the success of the PoC, the Information Department wanted us to commit to having C2PA marking for all news content. Aware of the challenges related to immediate global implementation, we opted for a progressive approach.
A minimum viable product was defined, setting the goal of daily publication of the television news of our two main channels in their entirety with C2PA marking.
This first industrialization phase has focused on the daily editions of the 13:00 and 20:00 news, which are published on a dedicated page of the franceinfo.fr news site. This approach not only allows testing the system in real conditions but also gathering user and industry feedback, valuable information for refining the larger-scale deployment strategy.
Indeed, we have realized that the main technical difficulties were not in marking news content with the C2PA protocol. Certainly, adopting this protocol, provisioning the C2PA ecosystem, managing certificates and manifests, and pulling in metadata from IPTC (the body that maintains the standard) to elaborate the manifest – all these elements had to be undertaken by the engineering teams.
But the biggest technological challenge was and still is in the distribution and playback of this news content. We found that not all of our suppliers were ready for this, even if many promoted their involvement in the C2PA consortium.
Thus, the engineering teams of the digital platform had to opt for progressive download in the initial phase, and they are currently working with our suppliers on transitioning to streaming.
These teams must develop a solid understanding the C2PA protocol to be able to appropriately expose the certification of France Télévisions’ content. The approach they are developing will allow for the future integration of any certification from our image, video, or photo suppliers.
A strong signal
By using C2PA daily, France Télévisions is sending a clear call to action for the industry: integrating this protocol into products and services for media is no longer an option, but a necessity. Technology solution providers must engage with us and evolve their solutions according to our needs.
The operational adoption of C2PA also sends a strong signal to the entire news sector. As the first broadcaster to commit to this path, the group paves the way for a new era of transparency in digital journalism.
This initiative also proves that media organizations must play an active role in defining and evolving the C2PA protocol, beyond the large technology companies that initiated the project. Currently, many discussions are taking place around defining the data that should be present in the manifests, with large technology companies wanting their own rules.
It is very important to ensure that the protocol’s future is not solely decided by these large technology companies. Public service media will be stronger if we work together – also with private sector actors – to integrate media specifications into the C2PA protocol. And this must involve a strong commitment from our companies towards its adoption.
France Télévisions sees this technology as a means to strengthen its public service mission. By offering citizens the tools to distinguish reliable information from manipulated content, the group contributes to media education and the fight against the spread of false information.
For C2PA to reach its full potential, it is crucial that other actors in the media landscape follow suit. Widespread adoption of the protocol would create an ecosystem where content authenticity becomes the norm rather than the exception.
This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of tech-i magazine.