In today’s digital landscape, AI-generated content and deep fakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making it harder for viewers and platforms to trust what they see on screen and increasing the need for clear, verifiable authenticity signals. To address this challenge, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard provides a way to track the origin and editing history of digital content. During our recent hackathon, our project focused on bringing C2PA Content Credentials to video streaming workflows by integrating the standard with the Bitmovin Player and using the Player as a natural point to surface authenticity information during playback.
In this blog, we introduce the basics of C2PA, explain why content authenticity is particularly important for video streaming, and walk through how our hackathon prototype validates Content Credentials in real time using the Bitmovin Player.
The Growing Need for Content Authenticity
The rise of generative AI tools has made it remarkably easy to create convincing fake videos, manipulate existing content, and spread misinformation at scale. For content distributors, broadcasters, streaming, and social media platforms, this creates a significant trust problem. When viewers can’t determine whether footage is authentic, the credibility of the entire platform suffers. C2PA offers a solution by embedding tamper-evident metadata directly into media files, creating a verifiable chain of custody from creation through distribution that can be independently checked by tools and players that support the C2PA standard. This challenge is especially visible in sectors such as:
- News and journalism: where audiences need confidence that reporting and eyewitness footage are genuine.
- Public sector and political communication: where manipulated videos can influence public opinion and elections.
- Sports and live events: where real-time clips and highlights must be trusted by fans and rights holders.
- Social media and user-generated content (UGC) platforms: where creators and viewers need clear signals about what is original and what is synthetic.
Regulatory proposals are already taking shape in the EU. For example, a July 2025 study for the European Parliament’s JURI Committee recommended that general-purpose generative AI models be required to embed a tamper-resistant, C2PA-compatible credential in all public-facing content. This metadata must clearly identify the model/provider, indicate if the content was human-prompted or fully autonomous, and be machine-readable even after standard compression or format conversion. For streaming platforms, this points toward a future where visible, verifiable authenticity signals become a baseline expectation rather than a niche feature.
What is C2PA and Content Credentials?
C2PA is an open technical standard developed by a coalition that includes major industry leaders such as Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, BBC, and Sony. The standard defines how to attach provenance metadata, called Content Credentials, to digital media assets. Think of it as a nutrition label for digital content, as it provides transparent information about where the content came from, who created it, what tools were used, and what modifications were made along the way. These can include:
- Origin & Source: Where and how the content was first created, for example GPS location, capture date, and time.
- Edits & Actions: A transparent record of modifications to the asset, such as color correction, cropping, or compositing, with timestamps and signature records.
- Asset Ingredients: Whether the asset is AI-generated or includes AI-generated components, plus the models, tools, or source materials involved.
- Content Bindings: Cryptographic hashes and other technical identifiers that ensure the authenticity, integrity, and verifiability of the asset.
Content Credentials work through a combination of cryptographic signatures and metadata manifests. When content is created or edited using C2PA-enabled tools, a manifest is generated that includes details about the asset’s origin, any modifications, and a cryptographic hash of the content. This manifest is signed with a private key to ensure authenticity and integrity. Any subsequent edits create a new manifest that links back to the previous one, building a complete provenance chain.
The beauty of C2PA is that it is tamper-evident rather than tamper-proof. If someone modifies the content without updating the manifest, the cryptographic verification will fail, immediately signaling that the content has been altered. This doesn’t prevent manipulation, but it makes it visible and verifiable so validation tools and players can clearly indicate when credentials are missing, invalid, or no longer match the underlying media.
Why C2PA matters for video streaming
While C2PA has gained traction in still photography, with manufacturers like Sony and Nikon adopting it for images, video streaming presents unique challenges. Unlike a single image file, video is commonly delivered as fragmented segments over protocols like DASH or HLS. Each segment needs to be validated independently during playback, requiring real-time verification as the content streams.
For streaming platforms and broadcasters, C2PA integration offers several compelling benefits:
- Trust and transparency: Viewers can quickly check whether the content they are watching has been altered since capture or approval.
- Regulatory compliance: C2PA gives platforms a standardized way to label and verify synthetic or AI-generated media in line with emerging regulations.
- Brand protection: For premium content providers, Content Credentials help protect against unauthorized modifications and ensure that content is presented as intended.
- Combat misinformation: By making the provenance of video content transparent and verifiable, platforms can help users make informed decisions about the media they consume.
The challenge, however, is implementing this technology in video streaming workflows, where content is split into hundreds or thousands of small segments, each requiring independent validation. This real-time verification must not disrupt the viewing experience, so the validation step needs to run asynchronously and carefully optimize performance to avoid adding startup delay or buffering.
Integrating C2PA with the Bitmovin Player
During our recent hackathon, we built a proof-of-concept integration that brings C2PA validation to the Bitmovin Web Player using the official C2PA JavaScript SDK. The implementation demonstrates how streaming platforms can validate Content Credentials in real-time during playback, and you can try the demo yourself here: https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/c2pa/.
The integration takes advantage of the Bitmovin Player’s Network API, which allows us to intercept and preprocess HTTP responses before video segments are processed. This preprocessing step is where we extract C2PA manifest data from each downloaded segment. By combining this with the player’s SegmentPlayback events, we can trigger validation for each segment as it plays, checking the cryptographic signatures and ensuring the content has not been tampered with.
The system handles the relationship between initialization segments and data segments in fragmented MP4 files, which is critical for proper C2PA validation in DASH and HLS streams. The validation results are shown through a user interface with three possible states:
- Valid (content has verified Content Credentials),
- Invalid (credentials are present but verification failed),
- No credentials (content doesn’t include C2PA data).
Users can click on the validation indicator to view detailed manifest information, including the content’s origin and any editing history.
The path forward for content authenticity
Our hackathon project demonstrates that integrating Content Credentials with video players is both practical and performant. As the C2PA standard continues to gain industry adoption, we expect to see more streaming platforms implementing validation capabilities to build trust with their audiences. For Bitmovin, this prototype is a first step toward understanding how authenticity signals could fit alongside our solutions and existing playback, analytics, and monetization workflows.
For developers interested in exploring C2PA integration, the C2PA JavaScript SDK provides the foundation for building validation into web-based video players. By bringing Content Credentials to video streaming, platforms can help viewers make informed decisions about the content they consume which is an increasingly important capability as AI-generated and manipulated content becomes more prevalent. Over time, content authenticity indicators in the player may become as common and expected as HTTPS locks in the browser, giving viewers a simple, familiar signal that the provenance of what they are watching can be verified.
Additional Resources: Try our demo and learn more about C2PA: