Video engagement platform Brightcove recently announced its latest product roadmap and vision.
The update follows a year of accelerated innovation for Brightcove under Bending Spoons’ ownership. Moving forward, 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).
New Digital Age spoke with Facundo Alvarez Morales, Product Lead at Brightcove, to find more…
What’s the idea behind announcing your product roadmap and vision for the rest of the year?
This roadmap marks a decisive next step in our ambition to build the industry’s most intelligent and scalable video engagement platform, and it reflects the pace of progress we have been able to drive over the past year. As 2026 gets underway, with some of our strongest product momentum in years, we want to give customers transparency into what is coming and why. Most importantly, the roadmap is built from insights gathered from hundreds of our customers and sets out a clear path for how we will deliver measurable value through faster innovation, deeper intelligence, and a more seamless experience that helps customers drive engagement, accessibility and monetisation across live and on demand video.
The roadmap has two main strands: ‘AI Innovation’ and ‘Quality of Experience’ – how were these selected and why boil things down to two key themes in this way?
The decision to centre the roadmap around AI Innovation and Quality of Experience reflects the themes we hear most consistently from customers. AI Innovation focuses on smarter tools that simplify workflows, unlock more value from video, and enable new capabilities at scale.
Quality of Experience is split into two areas. End-viewer enhancements improve what audiences see and interact with through sleeker player experiences, more adaptive formats like vertical video, and more engaging presentations. Video management improvements focus on how customers work with Brightcove by streamlining workflows, expanding analytics and decision-making tools, and giving organisations greater control over the platform. Together, this framing makes it clear where we’re investing and why it matters to both customers and their audiences.
Which planned innovation for 2026 are you most excited about?
There are several innovations planned for 2026 that we’re particularly excited about, and many of them are set to arrive in the first half of the year. Caption enhancements, contextual advertising, and the full Video Cloud redesign stand out because each one represents a meaningful step forward for our customers. Together, they build on the progress we made last year and signal the scale of what’s coming next.
What has being part of Bending Spoons added to Brightcove’s offering?
Being part of Bending Spoons has strengthened how Brightcove builds and delivers product improvements by combining Brightcove’s deep video expertise with a broader platform that brings together AI, data, and engineering specialists at scale. That combination has allowed us to accelerate innovation while continuing to raise the bar on reliability, performance, and usability across the platform. The impact of this approach is already visible in the 20 major enhancements delivered in the past 12 months. Just as importantly, it has helped us apply customer insight more effectively across the product, resulting in a more focused roadmap and greater confidence throughout 2026.
Are there any market trends worth paying attention to in relation to brand marketers’ use of video?
Brand marketers are being asked to scale their video efforts while keeping execution simple and effective. In media environments, that means getting more reach and engagement from content, supported by intelligent ways to monetise at scale and workflows that can support high-volume production. For enterprise teams, the focus is on accessibility, faster and more intuitive video management, and the ability to experiment and evolve how video is created and used across the organisation. The areas we’re investing in, from AI-driven captions and automated descriptions to smarter content intelligence and publishing workflows, are shaped by how customers are actually using video today and what they need to do next.
What key piece of advice would you offer brand marketers for 2026?
For the year ahead, the strongest video strategies will be those that focus on fundamentals that genuinely strengthen audience connection, particularly accessibility, consistency, and a high-quality viewing experience. At the same time, marketers are operating in an environment where new tools and capabilities are emerging constantly, changing how audiences and teams interact with digital platforms. In that context, our role is to support marketers as they experiment, adapt, and evolve their use of video without adding unnecessary complexity. Our roadmap is designed to help teams simplify execution, test new approaches with confidence, and focus on what delivers real impact, while maintaining quality and coherence as video becomes an increasingly central part of their strategy.
