Introducing the Brightcove 2026 roadmap: Expanded AI features and smoother customer experience

This ambitious roadmap was built with our customers, for our customers. In the past several months, we participated in hundreds of conversations to better understand your needs and priorities. We used the resulting insights to identify new ways to deliver faster innovation, deeper intelligence, and a more seamless experience for both our customers and their audiences.

The roadmap includes several new features and improvements across our two core tracks: AI Innovation and Quality of Experience.

AI Innovation

Building the most powerful AI tools to help our customers unlock their full potential.

• Next-generation AI captions with speaker attribution, native real-time captioning, and improved accuracy and expanded language support
• AI-powered accessibility and compliance to meet WCAG, ADA, and European Accessibility Act requirements
• Smarter monetization with AI-driven advertising
• Automated video intelligence with auto-generated video chapters and AI-assisted live clipping

Quality of Experience

Emphasizing small but meaningful changes to make the Brightcove experience as smooth, reliable, and enjoyable as possible.

• Full Video Cloud redesign
• Web/mobile player and SDK upgrades for iOS and tvOS
• Expanded publishing flexibility with native support for TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Reels in Brightcove Social, plus additional gallery enhancements
• Improved visibility and tracking for user activity logs and advertising metrics
• New search functionality within Live Channels to simplify navigation

We'll be releasing these over the course of the year—keep reading for a deep-dive into each individual feature and improvement.

Expanded AI Innovation—8 powerful new AI features

Back in 2025, we significantly expanded Brightcove’s AI capabilities, leveraging the in-house expertise at Bending Spoons to quickly build powerful and useful tools for core video needs, including AI Captions, Universal Translator, Metadata Optimizer, and Content Multiplier. 

In 2026, we’re doubling down on Brightcove’s AI Suite with eight powerful new capabilities.

Captions improvements to scale localization and enhance accessibility

• Speaker attribution: A more powerful captioning engine with speaker recognition (i.e. the ability to automatically identify and label different speakers within generated captions or transcripts)
• Live captions: Native, real-time AI-generated captions during live streams for greater accessibility and compliance while enhancing viewer engagement
• Accuracy & language expansion: Improved auto-captions accuracy and expand language coverage, with support for up to 90+ languages, including Scandinavian languages, Te Reo Māori,
and Urdu

New AI workflows to enhance viewer experience

• Contextual advertising: More relevant and better-targeted ad delivery by passing contextual, scene-level cue-point information to the ad server
• Ad-break detection: Automatic identification of the best ad insertion points within videos using content and sentiment analysis to detect the natural transition moments for ad breaks 
• Audio-track descriptions: AI-generated audio descriptions that narrate key visual elements to meet WCAG, ADA, and European Accessibility Act requirements

Auto-generated video chapters for more intuitive navigation of long-form content at scale.

Automatically generated video chapters are created by analyzing transcripts and visual cues resulting in structured, time-stamped segments that improve navigation and accessibility.

Live automated clipping to enhance ROI on high-profile live events.

This enhanced Live-to-VOD and social publishing workflow will help teams instantly create, edit, and share clips from ongoing live streams. The feature combines AI-assisted moment detection with simplified clipping and publishing tools.

Continued investment in the customer & end-viewer experience

One of our key priorities for the year is to enhance how customers and audiences interact with Brightcove every day. To do so, we’ll be rolling out several additional initiatives designed to make the video management and end-viewer experience as smooth, reliable, and enjoyable as possible. 

A full visual and functional Video Cloud redesign to bring customers a more intuitive video workflow.

This includes a full redesign of the Video Cloud UI across all modules to create smoother, more intuitive workflows, along with targeted UX improvements to streamline frequent actions and reduce cognitive load.

New tracking processes for greater visibility on key user and viewer actions

• New user activity logs: Provide additional records of user actions (such as deletions, edits) to support auditing, incident investigation, and compliance
• Advertising-improved Google-Tag-Manager metrics: Surface IMA Pause, Resume, and Skip events as Brightcove Player events for improved tracking through Google Tag Manager for advertising workflows

A new search capability within Live Channels to improve operational efficiency and reduce friction with streamlined navigation

Now, users can quickly locate streams by name or channel ID, simplifying navigation for accounts running multiple live events.

Gallery improvements to support multiple in-page experiences in the Immersion template architecture

Easily combine and switch between them, along with new Immersion template elements (e.g., Agenda, People) for greater design flexibility.

Expanded publishing flexibility

We're building on previous updates with native support for TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Reels in Brightcove Social, along with additional gallery enhancements to deliver a more versatile immersion template experience.

Two initiatives to improve Brightcove Player and SDKs

• iOS and tvOS Liquid Glass support: Ensure compatibility with Apple’s new Liquid Glass framework to support next-generation user interfaces and app store requirements and enable further capabilities to style the player and display metadata for the
tvOS SDK
• Web player & Mobile SDK redesign: A visual redesign and light interaction improvements

Plus, 1-2 more wildcards! 🐯

We also plan to explore additional opportunities in key areas, investing in one or two over the course of the upcoming year.

• Live Interactivity: Built-in polls, chat, Q&A, and reactions that turn live streams into interactive moments without third-party tools
• Non-interruptive ad formats: New squeeze-back, L-shaped, and banner ad formats that increase ad inventory without interrupting playback
• Live Universal Translator: AI-powered real-time multilingual captions so that can viewers choose their language during live events
• AI Thumbnails: AI-generated high-impact thumbnails and motion previews that maximize engagement and save manual editing time
• AI Search: Full-library semantic search that indexes captions and transcripts to help users instantly find videos more accurately
• SDK support for vertical videos: Extend vertical video capabilities, swipe feeds, preloading, and vertical UX, to native mobile SDKs
• Audio-only player development: A dedicated audio playback experience with analytics and monetization support for podcasts, radio, and audio-first content
• Agentic workflow enablement: A foundational AI-agent integration layer (MCP-compliant), allowing enterprises to automate ingestion, metadata, and video workflows via their own AI systems

We look forward to bringing our customers these new features and improvements over the course of 2026! Get in touch if you'd like to learn more about any of our upcoming features.