FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

[Simultaneous translation SPA-ENG will be available]

​​​​TVN holds one of the most significant archives in Latin America, preserving the social, political, and cultural heritage of our country through audiovisual records of incalculable value. This archive represents an emblematic case of the destruction of a large part of its collection following the Military Coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. Over the years, it has been recovered and is recognized today for the preserved content that has largely allowed us to reclaim our history as a society and a nation during those years.


Television material (news and programs) kept in the TVN Audiovisual Archive and produced during the Popular Unity government (Salvador Allende) was ordered to be eliminated—including the footage of Pablo Neruda receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. However, with a sense of historical protection, these materials were hidden for years until Chile returned to democracy. Their preservation was a risky method during years dominated by institutional violence and uncertainty. Today, we can feel proud and fulfilled in our duty as "guardians of history and memory," because this content has been a fundamental pillar for countless historical recovery programs. These programs have allowed us to recognize ourselves as Chileans, to know who we were and what our society was like before the Military Dictatorship—how cities, inhabitants, urban tribes, and music have changed.


During difficult times, one way to protect the archive content marked for elimination was to remove the cards from the manual catalog that detailed the material. We created minimal descriptions of images documenting protests against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in the 1980s. The cataloging systems for this new material were insufficient, or their context had been lost. It was a slow and costly task, making it difficult to reconstruct the moments they were recorded. We had to conduct extensive research to re-catalog this material, searching through newspapers and frequently consulting the memory of journalists for accurate descriptions. It was only then—at a time when it was finally possible to speak of human rights, political violence, or detained-disappeared persons—that we truly grasped the importance of having preserved those images. This process was necessary to establish how events unfolded in accordance with history.
The digitization process of this Archive began in 2010 with a planned ingestion project tailored to our needs and our commitment to the social role of the archive, which is part of the Audiovisual Heritage of TVN, Chile's public television.
It is important to highlight the work of librarians and journalists in re-cataloging content from those dictatorial times, when language was tightly controlled, and beginning to use a new language that accurately described what the images showed regarding Human Rights, violence, repression, and detained-disappeared persons.
With the help of digitization, we have set the fundamental task of increasing data collection to improve user-centered planning for this archive. We continue to move forward with the ingestion of historical content, solving daily the challenges posed by such old materials and formats that are increasingly difficult to rescue, but which contain valuable content reflecting the lives of Chileans during a specific era.


The commitment the Archive assumes toward history and the collective memory of a country is remarkable: without archives, there is no memory, and when we speak of memory, we are speaking of preservation.


Our mission as the Archive of Chilean Public Television is to preserve the audiovisual heritage that belongs to all Chileans. It is within this mission that we have focused our work to fulfill the challenge and dream of making the content archived and preserved for over 55 years available to all of Chilean society.


Finally, I believe that a great "vision for the future" will mark our path as archivists, allowing us to fulfill our mission of preserving images as a reflection of our society's history, ensuring that through them, memory can reconstruct the life lived.

[Simultaneous translation SPA-ENG will be available]

The project aims to rescue and to put into value the oldest surviving sound newsreels in Chile. Because they are in 35mm nitrate film, they are inaccessible to the public due to the lack of other film or digital copies. To achieve these objectives, the project includes the following stages: cleaning and physical restoration, 4K digitization, detailed cataloging, backup on LTO-9 tapes, and online publication via the Chilean National Film Archive's platform. These actions will allow for the registration, inventorying, and documentation of a valuable historical heritage collection, ensuring its long-term preservation and future availability for public use.


The collection of sound newsreels produced by the state-owned company Chile Films between 1944 and 1949 constitutes a valuable social, economic, and cultural record of Chile in the 1940s. These images and sounds are practically unknown to current generations, making their rescue, enhancement, and preservation essential for Chileans (and the world at large) to discover and to enjoy them. Because they were filmed nearly 80 years ago, the original film stock is now very fragile (nitrate film can spontaneously combust and, over time, becomes cloudy, making recovery impossible). Therefore, their digitization and transfer to more stable formats that allow for their preservation and dissemination are urgently needed.

We present an initial methodological framework for representing events in the automated cataloguing of journalistic audiovisual content. Integrated into a broader research project on the automation of document analysis in newsrooms, this study examines how eventbased metadata can be effectively modelled using controlled vocabularies, without requiring structural modifications to existing MAM indexing
systems. The approach operationalizes the 5W model—adapted here as 4W + 1H—through lightweight, nonontological solutions suitable for legacy documentation environments.


The research draws on a corpus of more than 5,000 news items related to the 2024 DANA weather event in the Valencian Community. Using a representative sample, the study analyses three types of documentary elements—documents, segments, and stories—to identify common metadata patterns, assess their potential for reuse in cascading automated workflows, and determine the structural limits of storylevel aggregation in news production contexts.


The results reveal persistent issues such as overindexing, multisemantic fields, weak traceability, and inconsistent responses to the 5W framework. The study examines whether advanced semanticweb structures (ontologies, knowledge graphs) are necessary, or whether enhancing existing controlled vocabularies and refining metadata field architectures can provide sufficient robustness and operational value.


The findings underscore the need to improve metadata structures whose semantics depend both on their formal design and on their functional placement within the document record, as key factors for enhancing retrieval, consistency, and automation in audiovisual news cataloguing.

[Simultaneous translation SPA-ENG will be available]

This presentation reflects on how a practical archival task inside a Uruguayan television broadcaster evolved, over sixteen years, into a knowledge-driven system for managing, contextualising and reusing audiovisual memory.
The project began in 2010, when I was assigned the recovery of a historical television archive using only handwritten paper notebooks as the primary access tool. At the same time, much of the collection still existed on ageing analogue and early digital videotape formats (1-Inch Tape, U-Matic). To make the material accessible, I had to learn through experimentation how to clean, restore and digitise playback machines that were already several decades old.
Coming from a generation that experienced both analogue video culture and the first stages of digital editing, I combined broadcast operational knowledge with self-taught experimentation. Early attempts using Word documents and spreadsheets quickly proved insufficient for the speed and precision required in daily television production. This operational pressure led me to begin learning programming and databases in order to recreate the logic of the paper workflow in digital form: locating content quickly, identifying the correct tape, and later the precise timecode inside the material, find actors etc.
As newsroom demands increased, the system evolved continuously through real-world use, driven by requests from colleagues who relied on rapid access to historical footage. Even after the archive department was closed in 2020, the project continued independently, incorporating long-term preservation logic, production workflows, contextual metadata, artificial intelligence support and large-scale efficiency testing using a personal dataset of more than one million media assets collected over years of archival practice.
This case study explores how necessity, situated learning and broadcast reality can generate technological innovation from within archival work itself.
That's my story.

The Images Sport AI Project is the second major phase of the IOC’s long‑term digital transformation of its archival ecosystem, following the successful migration from bespoke on‑premises systems to a cloud‑based, integrated architecture between 2021 and 2024. This foundation introduced seven interoperable platforms for preservation, access and analytics, and enabled the structured migration of more than 85,000 audiovisual assets and 928,000 photographs with full metadata. 
Launched in 2024 in alignment with the IOC AI Agenda, the Images Sport AI Project introduces state‑of‑the‑art artificial intelligence into both front‑end discovery and back‑end documentation workflows. Its dual objective is to enhance search capabilities in The Olympic Media Library (TOML) and accelerate metadata creation within the Media Asset Management system through automated tagging. 
Front‑end innovations include AI‑driven image and video similarity search, enabling users to retrieve visually related content that traditional text‑based descriptions cannot capture. A conversational search prototype extends this further by combining TOML metadata, multimodal search and IOC data, allowing natural‑language queries and richer discovery pathways. 
On the back end, automated tagging uses deep‑learning models are developed to generate sport‑specific vocabularies (actions, equipment, venues), general actions, logos, symbols and framing descriptors, while deliberately excluding athletes’ identities or emotions to ensure compliance with legal and ethical frameworks. Winter sports vocabularies form the basis for pilot deployments ahead of Milano Cortina 2026, with Summer sports following  for Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games and Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. 
The project directly addresses key questions about large‑scale infrastructure, automation, authority control and ethical metadata governance. It positions the IOC Archives as a global laboratory for innovation within Sport Archives, demonstrating how AI can strengthen discoverability, operational efficiency and long‑term stewardship across extensive heritage collections.

When Reuters News Agency acquired the commercial archive licensing operation Screenocean, it inherited two distinct media asset management (MAM) systems. Maintaining these parallel environments — each shaped by its own metadata schemes, cataloguing practices, and operational workflows — introduced growing risks to preservation, discoverability, rights management, and long‑term sustainability. 
The challenge was twofold: migrating a large, active audiovisual archive while preserving the integrity and context of its assets. This paper outlines the methodologies used to address this challenge, including metadata mapping, risk assessment, and workflow redesign. 
This presentation examines the unification of these MAM environments as a case study in preservation through migration. Although driven by technical necessity, the consolidation was equally an exercise in ensuring continuity of archival stewardship amid organisational and technological change. 
Beyond large-scale asset migration, the paper explores effective approaches to MAM consolidation, including metadata harmonisation, duplication management, and the preservation of contextual and rights information that give archival materials their meaning and value. 
The project offers a practical case study for archives facing merger, restructuring, or infrastructure renewal, highlighting key lessons related to preservation, access, and sustainability. 

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a primary interface to knowledge and culture. Audiovisual archives therefore cannot remain passive observers. They steward some of the richest records of public life: broadcast history, oral testimony, performance, news, memory and cultural expression. As AI systems increasingly mediate discovery, interpretation and reuse, archives face shared challenges around extraction, invisibility, misrepresentation, governance and reciprocity.
This panel frames these challenges through the concept of Public AI: an approach to AI that serves the public interest rather than purely commercial logics. For audiovisual heritage, this means three concrete things. First, public assets: archival data, metadata, tools and standards should remain as open, interoperable and reusable as possible, reducing dependence on closed platforms. Second, public purposes: AI should support access, interpretation, education, participation and creative reuse of audiovisual heritage, rather than merely mining archives as raw material. Third, public oversight: decisions about how archival content is used in AI, under what conditions, and with what safeguards, must remain subject to meaningful public accountability.
Together, these principles offer a practical alternative to extractive AI models. They position audiovisual archives not just as data providers, but as institutions that can shape more democratic and trustworthy AI futures.
In this panel, three speakers will explore how audiovisual archives can contribute to Public AI through data stewardship, contextualisation, standards, rights-aware access and collaborative governance. The discussion builds on the Alignment Assembly “Culture for AI” [1] and follow-up work linked to the Data Space for Cultural Heritage and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.
Participants will gain concrete insights into how audiovisual archives can respond strategically to AI, including practical perspectives on metadata, rights, access, standards and collaboration that are directly relevant to the FIAT/IFTA community.
[1] https://www.dataspace-culturalheritage.eu/en/news/discover-our-new-publication-on-artificial-intelligence-and-the-data-space

Audiovisual archives are sovereign infrastructures of cultural memory. They are not merely collections of content: they are the evidentiary foundation of public discourse, the raw material of historical knowledge, and a shared resource whose integrity is a condition of trust in media institutions. Generative AI and deepfakes can pose a structural threat to this integrity — not only by enabling the production of false content, but by corroding the epistemic status of archival material itself. A manipulated archive is no longer a reliable source; it is a liability.
This paper argues that broadcasters occupy a distinctive position in the governance of AI-generated deepfakes: neither as technology providers nor as distribution platforms, but as custodians of audiovisual heritage with editorial responsibility, reputational capital, and existing technical capacity. From this position, broadcasters can act as upstream governance actors — intervening at the point of content production rather than relying exclusively on downstream detection, fact-checking, or user-labelling. The central claim is that voluntary adoption of content-marking standards (watermarking, C2PA/IPTC metadata, provenance certification) by broadcasters constitutes a form of shared technological capacity that strengthens the infrastructure sovereignty of audiovisual archives.
The paper develops its argument through three moves. First, it situates broadcasters within a polycentric governance framework (drawing on Ansell et al., 2023 and Floridi et al., 2024, 2026), distinguishing this approach from the normative inflation critique: the effectiveness of broadcaster-led governance derives not from adding further voluntary principles to an already saturated landscape, but from the specificity of institutional incentives and the concreteness of available technical tools. Second, it analyses Article 50 of the EU AI Act and the draft Code of Practice on AI-generated content transparency (currently under finalisation) as a case study of how regulatory frameworks interact with — and depend upon — horizontal governance by media institutions. Third, it addresses the question of transferability: drawing on critical perspectives, the paper asks what conditions must be met for broadcaster-led marking standards to function as genuine shared capacity across diverse institutional and infrastructural contexts.The argument is grounded in a body of emerging literature on AI governance, media self-regulation, and archival provenance standards, and engages directly with initiatives such as the EBU's sovereign AI framework, and the guidelines developed by the Archival Producers Alliance.