MILAN—Streaming tech providers Brightcove announced two new capabilities in its AI Suite for video advertising: AI Contextual Ads and Smart Ad Breaks.
Both features are now available to customers.
"AI has transformed a lot of the video workflow over the past two years, captions, transcripts, metadata generation," said Facundo Alvarez Morales, product lead at Brightcove. "With AI Contextual Ads and Smart Ad Breaks, we're bringing it to a different layer: the decisions inside the platform that decide what a video earns. That's where we believe AI should be working hardest in this industry."
The two capabilities join a Brightcove AI Suite that has seen improvements relating to captions, transcripts, metadata generation, and content discovery in the past year.
Brightcove is also reporting that it plans twenty major releases in the last twelve months, including Prism, a fully redesigned interface launched in the past weeks.
The launch arrives at a moment of structural change in the advertising market, Brightcove executives said in making the announcement. The global contextual advertising market is on track to reach $258 billion in 2026 and $379 billion by 2030, driven by the deprecation of third-party cookies and the demand for brand-safe environments.
In addition, connected TV is the fastest-growing premium ad format, with the US market reaching $33.5 billion in 2026, a 28% year-over-year increase that outpaces every other established digital channel.
The rapid growth of both contextual advertising and connected TV put pressure on the ability of platforms to maintain the quality of the contextual signal feeding the ad call, and the precision of the moment the ad is placed, Brightcove explained.
The two new features are designed to help users overcome those problems.
AI Contextual Ads reads video content scene by scene and categorizes it against the IAB contextual taxonomy at both the video and scene level. The resulting signals are passed into the ad server at the moment of the ad call, giving advertisers contextual targeting at the resolution of the individual scene rather than the asset as a whole, a single video can pass different signals to different ad breaks. The ad selection mechanism itself does not change; what changes is that scene-level contextual becomes a real input alongside the dozens already weighed by the ad server.
Smart Ad Breaks analyses each video and recommends mid-roll cue point positions based on natural pauses, scene transitions, and brand safety signals. Editorial teams review and approve the suggestions before they go live.
"Scene-level contextual targeting at scale runs into one practical problem: the manual effort it takes to produce the signal." said Janpaul Pescollderungg, product manager at Brightcove. "AI Contextual Ads removes that bottleneck, and Smart Ad Breaks lets editorial teams scale their judgment across the library rather than the slice they have time to watch. The result is the heavy lifting comes off the team, and the judgment stays where it belongs."
