Introduction
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is a globally recognized professional non-profit association that develops standards, practices, and guidelines for the media and entertainment industry. With a legacy of advancing technologies such as timecode, UHDTV, high dynamic range, digital cinema, Interoperable Master Format (IMF) and Media over IP (MoIP), SMPTE continues to lead efforts in ensuring interoperability, reliability, and innovation across professional media workflows.
This survey is part of a broader initiative by the SMPTE Study Group on Content Provenance and Authenticity (CPA) to gather industry insights from individuals, companies as well as organizations on how authenticity and provenance metadata are used, needed, and challenged in real-world media environments. While the Material Exchange Format (MXF) is a key focus—given its widespread use in professional media and urgent need for a solution—the scope of this survey is not limited to MXF. We are equally interested in understanding use cases, user stories, requirements, and challenges across other formats and workflows, including acquisition, professional streaming infrastructure, post-production, and archiving. For that reason, the survey consists of two parts, a more general part and an MXF specific part. Individuals may submit multiple surveys, sharing both personal and organizational perspectives.
The goal is to identify gaps in current standards, explore interoperability with emerging technologies such as Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), and inform future SMPTE work that supports secure, verifiable, and trustworthy media production. Your participation will help shape the next generation of standards and best practices for CPA across the media ecosystem.
We value your privacy, and all responses will be treated anonymously. Please do not include any personal or identifying information such as name, contact info, time, and location when you give free-form answers if you do not want to be contacted.
The responses collected in this survey will be presented in a summarized fashion in a report to be published later by the Study Group. All responses will be treated as anonymous in the report.
