SMART STORIES showed its first public architectural detail at the mpts.london conference on Thursday 14 May, six weeks after the consortium launch announcement on 30 April. An EVS-led whiteboard, photographed during the talk, sets out the Story Object Model (SOM) as a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT), the same data structure that powers Figma and Google Docs, synchronising news context across Local and Regional altitudes within a newsroom and between newsrooms.
The runtime architecture splits into three regions. LIVE ingests feeds through a router into Ksender, Kvideo and IVR modules, with a Cerebrum reasoning agent and ViaMap and Social sub-skills sitting above the router. NEARLIVE is the store layer, with Moments Lab indexing records at two altitudes: a Local SOM per newsroom and a Regional SOM per region, sync arrows pointing both ways. DISTRO runs Skills against the store and feeds Web, Bing and Trace output adapters.
Trint contributed a live-news interface mock, framed as "Breaking News, Croatia Interview", that shows four SOM behaviours: known story state, AI-monitored transcript matching against the current premise, context-based flagging of new facts (the example used was "death toll now 12") with verification-required tagging, and a Live Quote Finder that surfaces soundbites against organisation-specific Skills plus the current story context.
SMART STORIES is selling Skills as the moat. The pitch from the stage was: "BBC Skills run BBC standards. ITN Skills run ITN's. Framework open. Workflow yours." Read as competitive strategy, this puts an open protocol layer underneath proprietary editorial DNA, the inverse of the Avid plus Google Cloud stack announced at NAB 2026, which buries a single vendor's intelligence layer underneath proprietary newsroom output. Skills carry the moat: shared transport, defended editorial judgment, which means broadcaster IP stays inside the building while transport interoperates. AP, juggling concurrent newsroom buyouts, is a full consortium member; the editorial test is whether the open layer survives contact with members whose first-party labour position is shrinking.
Governance and transport remain open questions. Trint's framing of an editor "publishing back to the bus" implies a pub/sub message layer, which puts the choice between MQTT, NATS or a custom protocol on the standards committee, and the choice between SMPTE, AMWA NMOS, EBU or a new body on the governance question. The full proof of concept is due at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, 11 to 14 September.
