The EBU and NVIDIA have announced an expansion of the sovereign standards they introduced last year for European public service media. The initiative now aims to bring in sovereign cloud providers, open model developers and systems integrators to define how broadcasters can deploy agents while keeping control of their data, infrastructure, models and security, as the company has claimed in a statement.

As agents move into newsrooms, production and audience services, broadcasters claim for a foundation that protects editorial independence, data sovereignty and national resilience.

The expanded initiative is turning those principles into deployable services. It’ll look forward to defining requirements and reference architectures for where workloads run, how data is governed, which models power services and how systems stay secure throughout their lifecycle.

“These standards give EBU members a shared foundation to strengthen resilience, retain control and deliver accountable advanced services that sustain audience trust”, explains Annsofi Eriksson, chief technology officer at the EBU.

Cloud providers will map the standards to sovereign deployment options:

• Microsoft will bring expertise from Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, including Azure Local and Foundry Local, with the intention of letting broadcasters process sensitive editorial material locally and keep critical services running when external connectivity is down.
• Nebius offers a platform for broadcasters to focus on training, fine-tuning and running their own models on European infrastructure.

Open models pretend to give broadcasters the visibility to inspect, evaluate and adapt AI for local languages, archives and editorial policies. NVIDIA Nemotron open models are designed to provide a foundation broadcasters can customize for domain-specific applications and public-service requirements.

“Sovereign cloud infrastructure and open models can help Europe’s public service media innovate while protecting data, editorial independence and cultural diversity”, notes Delphine Ernotte, CEO of France Télévisions and president of the EBU.

Media-specific consulting and systems integration provided from Qvest and other system integrators to ensure that reference architectures are practical, interoperable and deployable in real world broadcast environments.