The world’s major news players adopt IPTC G2 for news exchange

Five of the largest global news agencies have agreed to endorse and support the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) G2 family of news exchange standards.

Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, dpa, the Press Association, and Thomson Reuters will support standards developed by the IPTC, that will provide news agencies, vendors, and customers around the world with a uniform method of exchanging multimedia news content.

Existing IPTC standards such as IPTC7901 and NITF have been implemented by many organizations around the world for many years. The availability of the new G2-Standards marks the first time the largest agencies have come together to publicly endorse an IPTC standard. Support from these major agencies means that the majority of the world’s news content will be available to all their customers in a standard format. The extensibility and multimedia support built into the new G2-Standards will facilitate cost and speed to market advantages that were difficult to achieve previously.

“Implementation and support of IPTC-G2 standards is a straight forward solution enabling an efficient and easy access to our Rich Media contents as requested by the new media markets“, said Jean-François Wets, Chief Information Officer of AFP. “Involved in the development of IPTC NewsML-G2 and EventsML-G2 since the beginning, we are happy to offer our clients and partners the benefits of technological changes transforming how news is produced and managed through its life time”.

“The latest generation of news standards developed by the IPTC will make it easier and more efficient for AP members and customers to send and receive news content, and integrate with our systems,” said Vince Tripodi, Vice President of Development for the AP.

“For more than 30 years news has been exchanged using the IPTC standard called 7901. Now the time has come for the new IPTC G2-Standards to meet the evolved business and technology requirements” said Helge Viehof, Chief Information Officer of dpa and Chair of the IPTC Standards Committee. “dpa's new editorial system is based on this new standard. The times for many different formats resulting in complex news exchange are over - dpa is able to speak IPTC G2!”.

“Central to Press Association's digital strategy is standardisation on a single content format. IPTC's G2-Standards provide a powerful, interoperable and extensible framework ideally suited to this purpose as it encapsulates media industry business logic, and enables all assets (text, pictures, videos, results) to be treated in the same way. For this reason, Press Association’s next generation news content systems are built around the IPTC G2-Standards.“

“Reuters adoption of the G2-Standards has enabled us to provide an interconnected data web of content resources for both our customers and internal editorial users” said Dave Compton, Senior Media Technologist at Reuters and joint architect of the IPTC G2-Standards. “With the new Reuters Media Connect Platform, we are now in a position to offer customers all of our multimedia content in a common format, using the delivery mechanism of their choice”.

“This joint endorsement is a milestone for the G2-Standards which were developed to make multimedia news exchange and event driven news management more cost efficient and easier to use,” said Stéphane Guérillot, Chairman of the IPTC, “that is a strong signal to the market and to the system vendors to implement the G2-Standards and the IPTC will support this effort. The IPTC G2-Standards have been developed by large and small member news agencies to meet a broad range of business requirements; they are already supported by additional news organisations around the world.”