Brightcove doubles down on AI and customer experience with ambitious 2026 roadmap

Milan, Italy | Brightcove today announced its 2026 product roadmap and vision, emphasizing its commitment to building the industry's most intelligent, scalable video engagement platform.

This latest update marks a decisive next step for Brightcove following a year of accelerated innovation under Bending Spoons' ownership. In the coming year, product development will focus on two areas: AI Innovation-covering areas such as monetization, accessibility and automation-and Quality of Experience to drive a better overall on-platform experience for customers and their end-viewers. Focusing on these priorities will further empower media companies, enterprises, and brands to drive greater engagement, accessibility, and monetization across live and on-demand video.

Since early 2025, Brightcove has leveraged Bending Spoons' centralized AI, data, and platform expertise to increase product innovation, reliability, performance, and usability across the product. After delivering 18 major platform enhancements in the second half of 2025 alone, the company is entering 2026 with its most ambitious roadmap yet.

"Brightcove is built with our customers, for our customers," explains Facundo Alvarez Morales, Product Lead at Brightcove. "We've used insights from hundreds of customers to shape priorities across accessibility, live operations, monetization, and platform experience. Brightcove enters 2026 with its strongest product momentum in years, delivering faster innovation, deeper intelligence, and a more seamless experience for our customers and their audiences."

AI Innovation

In 2026, key product development will focus on expanding Brightcove's AI Suite with several powerful new capabilities:

• Next-generation AI captions and localization: Smarter captions with speaker attribution, native real-time captions for live streams, improved accuracy, and expanded language support (90+ languages, including Scandinavian languages, Te Reo Māori, and Urdu)
• AI-powered accessibility and compliance: Automated audio descriptions to help customers meet WCAG, ADA, and European Accessibility Act requirements
• Smarter monetization with AI-driven advertising: Contextual advertising powered by scene-level metadata and sentiment-aware ad-break detection
• Automated video intelligence: Auto-generated video chapters, AI-assisted live clipping for instant social and VOD publishing, and intelligent moment detection for high-profile live events

Quality of Experience

Brightcove is also investing in the foundational platform experience to drive greater reliability, end-viewer satisfaction, and long-term customer retention.

• Full Video Cloud redesign: A modernized, consistent UI across all modules to reduce friction and streamline everyday workflows
• Player and SDK upgrades: iOS and tvOS Liquid Glass support, plus refreshed web and mobile player designs
• Expanded publishing flexibility: Building on previous updates with native support for TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Reels in Brightcove Social and additional gallery enhancements to deliver a more versatile immersion template experience
• Improved visibility and tracking: Enhanced user activity logs and deeper advertising metrics surfaced through Google Tag Manager
• Live operations efficiency: New search functionality within Live Channels to simplify navigation for customers running multiple concurrent streams

The roadmap will be delivered over the course of 2026, with highly anticipated features like caption improvements, contextual advertising, and the Video Cloud redesign slated to roll-out within the first half of the year.

Get more details about our upcoming roadmap-including other areas of exploration-in our latest blog post.