Keep viewers watching with Brightcove Recommendations

When a video ends, viewers face a simple choice: keep watching or leave. And without a compelling next step, up to 90% may leave without starting another video.

Brightcove Recommendations turns that critical moment into an opportunity to keep audiences engaged. Built directly into the Brightcove Web Player and powered by AI, it automatically surfaces the most relevant next video based on content relevance and what is trending with your audience.

Viewers get a simple path to more relevant content. You get more opportunities to extend viewing sessions, increase video views, and generate additional monetizable impressions.

Get more value from the audience you already have

Growing engagement is fundamentally about extracting more value from the viewers you already have. Every time a viewer stays through to near completion, they're signaling exactly what they like, and creating your highest-intent moment to recommend what comes next.

That signal is worth more than any cold start with a new visitor. A viewer at the end of a video has already invested their time, shown their interests, and proven they are willing to watch. They are primed, and what they need is a frictionless next step.

That can become more difficult as your content library grows across topics, series, formats, and publishing schedules. Even your strongest videos can go undiscovered when the next step is not clear.

Brightcove Recommendations closes that gap by placing relevant viewing options directly inside the player. Instead of asking viewers to search for more content—or leaving them at a dead end—you can create a natural path from one video to the next.

The impact can be significant: customers using the recommendation engine have seen up to a 40% increase in video views—more watch time, more ad opportunities, and more value from content they've already produced.

How Brightcove Recommendations works

It starts with the viewer. While someone is still watching, Recommendations surfaces the next best video right inside the player and moves them from one play to the next, so momentum never breaks when a video ends.

Behind that is an engine that does the connecting for you. As you publish, it automatically builds relationships between your videos and reads what is trending with your audience, keeping the experience fresh without anyone maintaining it by hand.

And all of it is native to Brightcove. There is no development work: you enable Recommendations, set your business rules, and measure their impact in the same place you already manage your content, with room to test different experiences and see what performs.

When you want to take it further, the Brightcove API lets you build carousels and galleries from related, trending, or most recent content and place them anywhere across your site.

Pair automation with editorial control

Recommendations should strengthen your content strategy, not compete with it.

That's why you stay in control of which videos are eligible to appear. Using tags, custom fields, and duration limits, you define the recommendation pool and keep suggestions aligned with your editorial, audience, and commercial goals.

A few ways to shape the experience:

• Within sports, keep recommendations tight to a specific league, competition, or event
• In news, surface interviews, explainers, and additional reporting tied to the same story, keeping viewers in the narrative
• For product education, if viewers watched a demo, recommend similar use-case demos or comparison videos
• For internal comms, lead employees from a company update to related training or educational resources in the same domain

You can also exclude content from the pool entirely. Keep internal videos or time-sensitive content like weather forecasts out of recommendations, so viewers never land on something that's already out of date.

And you can promote sponsored or priority videos within the experience, connecting audience engagement directly to your commercial objectives.

Turn more of your video library into viewer engagement

Keeping viewers engaged takes more than great content. It takes making that content easier to discover, more relevant, and more engaging once playback begins.

That is where Brightcove Recommendations does its work, creating a natural path from one video to the next and closing the gaps where viewers would otherwise lose interest or leave with nowhere to go.

It gets even better alongside the rest of Brightcove platform: with AI Metadata enriching every asset, the engine has the tags and context it needs to surface the right video at the right moment, and with web monetization in place, each extra viewing session turns into another monetizable impression. 

The result is a more connected experience that helps your audience discover more, watch longer, and get more out of the content you have already created.

Let's keep your viewers watching. →

Reaching mobile audiences too? See how Vertical Videos Experience turns your library into a swipeable, mobile-native feed.