milan—Streaming technology provider Brightcove announced two new features in its AI suite for video advertising: AI Contextual Ads and Smart Ad Break.
Both features are now available to customers.
“AI has transformed many video workflows in the past two years, including captioning, transcripts, and metadata generation,” said Facundo Alvarez Morales, Product Lead at Brightcove. “With AI contextual advertising and smart ad breaking, we bring that to another layer: the decisions within the platform that determine video revenue. We believe this is where AI is most important in this industry.”
These two capabilities join the Brightcove AI Suite, which has seen improvements in captioning, transcripts, metadata generation, and content discovery over the past year.
Brightcove also reports that it plans 20 major releases in the past 12 months. That includes Prism, a completely redesigned interface released in the past few weeks.
In making the announcement, Brightcove executives said the launch comes at a moment of structural change in the advertising market. The global contextual advertising market is expected to reach $258 billion by 2026 and $379 billion by 2030, driven by the elimination of third-party cookies and demand for brand-safe environments.
Additionally, connected TV is the fastest growing premium ad format, with the US market expected to reach $33.5 billion in 2026, up 28% year-over-year and outpacing other established digital channels.
Brightcove explained that the rapid growth of both contextual advertising and connected TV is putting pressure on the quality of the contextual signals fed into ad calls and the platform’s ability to maintain accuracy at the moment the ad is placed.
Two new features are designed to help users resolve these issues.
AI Contextual Ads reads video content scene by scene and classifies it based on IAB contextual classifications at both the video and scene level. The resulting signal is passed to the ad server at the moment of ad call, providing advertisers with contextual targeting at the resolution of individual scenes rather than the entire asset. A single video can pass different signals to different ad breaks. The ad selection mechanism itself remains unchanged. What changes is that scene-level context becomes the actual input alongside a lot of information already weighted by the ad server.
Smart Ad Breaks analyzes each video and recommends mid-roll cue point locations based on natural pauses, scene transitions, and brand protection signals. Our editorial team will review and approve your proposal before publishing it.
“One practical problem with scene-level contextual targeting at scale is that it requires manual effort to generate the signals,” said Janpaul Pescollderungg, Product Manager at Brightcove. “AI Contextual Ads eliminates that bottleneck, and Smart Ad Breaks empowers editorial teams to make decisions across the entire library rather than in one part of the time. As a result, the heavy lifting for teams is reduced and decisions stay in place.”
