Brightcove’s takeover by Bending Spoons, announced in late 2024 for an agreed $233 million, raised plenty of eyebrows. Now, a rejuvenated Brightcove is claiming that a leaner team and an arsenal of AI-powered tools are allowing the video platform provider to develop and roll out new features at an unprecedented rate.
“Last year, everyone wrote us off,” senior members of the Brightcove team told Faultline, in a post-IBC briefing.
That intro makes for a perfectly pleasant turnaround story, but there are more interesting themes lurking beneath the surface.
Milan-based Bending Spoons was not a name familiar to many in the B2B M&E market until relatively recently. With a portfolio weighted toward consumer-facing apps spanning productivity, creativity, publishing and livestreaming, the Brightcove acquisition marked its entrance into enterprise SaaS.
With a strapline that promises to acquire and improve iconic products, the pressure was on for Brightcove to become Bending Spoons’ enterprise test case.
Brightcove arrived at IBC 2026 boasting of 20+ innovations, and rivals rightly jeered the company’s brash marketing.
“Innovation” is a highly subjective term, and the customer ultimately decides whether a feature is innovative, not the creator. A game-changing new feature for a handful of clients might be considered cannon fodder by the majority. Does that still make something innovative?
Brightcove clarified to Faultline that the 20+ innovations figure refers to more than 20 new features developed since Bending Spoons took over, rather than 20 earth-shattering patented inventions.
The roadmap is about making small but incremental improvements to the platform, primarily adding must-have tools like automated translation and dubbing—the kind of localization features democratized by AI.
Critically, these new features have been driven by talking to customers to identify pain points and to get them rolled out as rapidly as possible.
For instance, an early attempt at voice-cloning for dubbing ran into a problem whereby broadcasters did not have the rights to clone the original speaker’s voice. Brightcove subsequently added synthetic voices that do not attempt to reproduce the original voice, and had this available just two weeks later.
Brightcove now claims to support natural-sounding dubbing in up to 90 languages across both on-demand and live video.
Those incremental changes have now culminated in Brightcove Gen 2, with the centerpiece of the platform being the new AI Agentic Hub.
The Agentic Hub is an API-first interface in which users can describe what they want to achieve in natural language. Agents can then read content and data, plan the required steps and execute multi-stage tasks.
Faultline was told that a couple of hundred Brightcove customers are already using the Agentic Hub in production, although the degree of automation varies considerably.
Some customers are using relatively straightforward functions such as subtitling and highlight clipping, while others are experimenting with more involved agentic workflows.
Analytics is one obvious use case. A user can ask for their top 13 videos and an engagement curve, for example. Another workflow could identify viewers in Spain and then determine which content needs Spanish captions.
Brightcove also claims that AI-generated metadata and recommendations can increase viewership by between 20% and 40%.
But what about handling agent permissions—does the Agentic Hub have authority to execute actions across a customer’s workflow, or is it more about recommending actions to humans?
Brightcove clarified that agents have both read and write capabilities and inherit the permissions of the user operating them.
The company is also working toward bringing MCP (Model Context Protocol)—the open standard connecting AI tools to external data sources like Brightcove’s—into production, with testing already under way with a small number of customers.
Anthropic introduced MCP in November 2024, meaning Brightcove’s competitors are much further along in adding this connectivity plumbing to their platforms, which is anathema to Brightcove’s speed of innovation messaging.
The QoE problem:
For all the talk of new features and faster development, Brightcove’s post-acquisition story naturally comes with caveats (and not just job cuts).
Around the period of Covid, Brightcove got heavily into QoE analytics and advertising, culminating in its $13.2 million acquisition of Wicket Labs in 2022.
The acquisition was intended to strengthen Brightcove’s analytics capabilities, with the company subsequently spending around 14 months integrating Wicket’s technology into a QoE analytics dashboard that is now part of Video Cloud.
However, Carl Rutman, Director of Sales Engineering at Brightcove, admitted to Faultline that Wicket Labs had not achieved the level of customer traction Brightcove had expected.
Faultline felt partly responsible for this deal, as we had reported months earlier how competitors like JW Player (now JWP Connatix) and Kaltura were using Brightcove’s weakness in analytics as a sales lever to poach clients.
Wicket Labs was supposed to inject the Brightcove video platform with machine learning models to help predict viewer behavior and customer lifetime values, as well as recommendations, subscriber cohort analytics, content analysis, and personalized playlists.
This is not to say Wicket Labs had bad technology, but that customers already had dashboard overload with established QoE metrics, while Brightcove spent far too long toying with yet another dashboard.
Now, with Agentic Hub, it has effectively undone that work.
Another example further back came in 2013, when Brightcove acquired Unicorn Media for its server-side ad insertion (SSAI) technology and a portfolio of patents.
Rutman described the inherited technology as requiring substantial redevelopment, with Brightcove ultimately rewriting significant parts of the stack.
Brightcove now says it has around 50 patents, with former VP of Research Yuriy Reznik among the people who helped build that portfolio.
More with less:
Ultimately, Brightcove has not hidden the fact that it is operating with a substantially smaller workforce.
Reports originally put the reduction at roughly one-third of the company, but more recent numbers put the workforce reduction at over 50%—from around 700 to under 300.
Yet Brightcove argues that this has not resulted in a diminished portfolio or product kill list. Fewer layers, more specialized engineering roles, and improvements in AI coding tools over the past nine months has helped accelerate its development cadence further.
But do customers agree with Bending Spoons’ mantra that it can acquire and improve iconic products?
The Television Academy and PGA Tour are among the customers Brightcove points to as examples of the platform integrating into existing workflows and operating largely in the background, supporting large volumes of video and audiences.
An anonymized customer described Brightcove’s AI dubbing as “creepy but really good”—an appropriate description in the current marketplace of a technology that works well before anyone has decided if they want to use it.
It would be remiss of us not to mention Bending Spoons’ subsequent $1.4 billion acquisition of Vimeo in 2025.
Both Brightcove and Vimeo occupy overlapping territories around enterprise video hosting, publishing and OTT, although their customer bases and product histories are not identical.
Vimeo is still operating independently, and not much has changed on the surface.
For Brightcove, the business is still jostling to demonstrate the value of its platform in a crowded video infrastructure market, where many of the underlying capabilities—encoding, CDN delivery, analytics, recommendations, localization and increasingly AI—are becoming commoditized.
For the purists, Brightcove does retain some critical technology under the hood, including the Zencoder cloud video transcoding service and its content-steering capabilities, which can automatically route traffic toward better-performing CDNs in different regions.
The company also says its OTT suite can reduce live-stream latency from around 20 seconds toward 5 seconds.
But perhaps the biggest recent change at Brightcove isn’t the Agentic Hub at all.
Maybe it’s the admission that some of the things Brightcove spent years building under previous guidance—and in Wicket Labs’ case, $13.2 million acquiring—did not resonate with customers as expected.
By running a feature conveyor belt of “innovations” based on customer needs, Brightcove believes it has a greater chance of success.