I’ve spent the last few years living inside livestreaming.
Every chaotic production call, every panicked Slack thread, every “did that really just happen on stream?” moment.
Livestreaming is one of the most powerful storytelling mediums on the planet. Nothing matches its energy. It’s raw, real, and commands an audience’s full attention in a way social or digital display never can. But for brands, that same energy has always come with a risk: you can’t control what happens live.
That’s the tension and the opportunity.
The Unsolvable Problem
In the early 2020s, livestreaming was the shiny new toy. Marketers flooded panels and trade shows, calling it the future of content. But once they got close to it, they realized how unpredictable it really was.
In a single broadcast, a stream can swing from wholesome to headline-making without warning. One moment, it’s light-hearted gameplay; the next, a heated rant or emotional spiral. That volatility is part of what makes live magnetic, and part of what makes it terrifying for brands.
Just last month, a major creator dominated the algorithm after using a shock collar on their dog during a stream (Forbes, 2025). Incidents like that are exactly why advertisers hesitate to lean in, even as audiences spend billions of hours watching live content every quarter (Streamlabs Report, Q2 2025).
It’s not that creators are reckless. It’s that live, by definition, doesn’t come with an edit button.
The result? Livestreaming has become the industry’s most-watched, least-monetized format.
The Missing Infrastructure
The truth is, livestreaming never had the infrastructure that every other media channel takes for granted. Television has decades of standards and automated clearance systems. Digital video has verification and contextual targeting. Even podcasts have baked-in moderation and pre-roll controls.
Live has… hope? I think?
That’s it. Brands cross their fingers that the streamer hits the talking points or that a moderator catches something in time. But there’s no true safety net, no scalable way to monitor, react, and protect in real time.
For brands that spend millions protecting their image, that’s all it takes to hit pause on live budgets for another year. According to a 2024 Brand Safety Institute survey, 61 percent of advertisers cited “unpredictable creator behavior” as their top reason for avoiding livestreaming campaigns.
As someone who builds campaigns in this space, I’ve sat in those rooms. You can feel the hesitation. The opportunity is massive; Gen Z and Gen Alpha spend hours a day in live environments, but the risk is bigger than the reward without real safeguards.
That infrastructure gap is why livestreaming, despite billions of hours watched each quarter (Streamlabs Report, Q2 2025), still accounts for a fraction of digital ad spend. It’s not a creative problem; it’s a confidence problem.
Why Brand Safety Has Been Unsolvable Until Now
Traditional brand-safety tools were built for static or on-demand content. They rely on post-processing: analyze the video after it’s published, flag anything unsafe, and adjust the next flight. That simply doesn’t work when the content is happening right now.
In live, there’s no pause button.
And the tools that do exist? They weren’t built for chaos. Keyword filters catch slurs, not sentiment. Contextual systems can tag a video, but they can’t judge a tone shift in a live chat. Post-flight audits are great for case studies, but useless when damage happens in real time.
AI is the first system that can actually keep up with human unpredictability at scale. It can interpret language, context, and tone in the same moment they happen. That’s not a minor upgrade, that’s the difference between reacting after a brand crisis and preventing one entirely.
How Real-Time AI Changes the Equation
Today, AI can process multiple signals at once – audio, text, and sentiment – and make split-second decisions about what’s happening on stream. That’s the leap forward livestreaming has needed.
In our own work building technology in this space, we build AI systems that constantly scan live feeds, chat logs, and audio transcripts to detect sudden spikes in risk: language shifts, tone escalation, or those always-changing slang terms that can mean one thing today and something totally different tomorrow. When a moment turns unsafe, the system can instantly pull an ad, replace creative, or alert human moderators.
The difference is speed. Instead of reacting hours later, you react as it happens.
And here’s the beautiful part: the same intelligence that protects can also empower. Brands can choose which live moments they want to be part of. If you only want your creative running during positive community interactions or high-energy gameplay, you can. If you’re comfortable being in every authentic moment, you can do that too.
For the first time, brands can shape their presence in live with precision instead of fear.
What It Means for Brands
This isn’t just about avoiding disaster; it’s about unlocking scale.
Unlocking scale means brands can finally plan, buy, and optimize livestreams like any other media channel; forecast spend, measure performance, and build continuity instead of rolling the dice on one-offs. I’ve seen brands drop $75,000 on a sponsored stream; it happens, and then they go, “Okay, now what?” They have no idea what they’re buying, how to measure it, or whether it puts their brand at risk of backlash. That uncertainty is what keeps live from scaling.
AI-driven brand safety fixes that. It gives marketers something they’ve never had in live: predictability. You know what your media dollars are adjacent to. You can quantify exposure and risk. You can optimize placements the same way you do with digital display.
That level of control attracts bigger budgets. It’s the reason TV and YouTube command trust: brands know they can be both visible and safe.
What It Means for Streamers
Here’s the part people overlook: when brands feel safe spending, streamers win.
Every streamer (and agent) I know wants stability. They love what they do, but the deal-by-deal hustle is exhausting. Real-time brand-safety infrastructure gives them repeatable revenue. Instead of relying on one-off sponsorships, streamers can tap into ongoing media campaigns that automatically match their content’s tone and community.
It also helps prevent the “adpocalypses” that crush the industry every few years. When one controversy hits, entire categories of sponsors tend to vanish overnight. But when brand safety is built into the infrastructure itself, it protects everyone: the brands, the platforms, and the streamers who depend on them.
And because ad integrations can now match tone and context, they feel organic, less intrusive than the pre-rolls or pop-ups that frustrate audiences today. Frankly, it probably does more good than a set of awkward talking points anyway. It’s what turns brand partnerships into part of the stream’s DNA.
It’s the difference between being talent in a one-off commercial and being the publisher of your own media property.
What It Means for Audiences
Audiences might not realize it, but they benefit too.
The more trust there is in live, the more brands invest, and the more streamers can create without financial stress.
Viewers also get better experiences: integrations that fit naturally into streams instead of awkward mid-rolls or jarring sponsor reads. When risk is managed at the infrastructure level, everyone else gets to focus on what makes live magical: the spontaneity, the community, the shared moment.
Why This Moment Matters
Livestreaming isn’t a niche anymore. It’s culture in real time.
Sports, gaming, music, even politics, all unfolding live in front of millions. Back in 2020, people said livestreaming was the future. It’s not the future anymore – it’s now.
AI changes the equation. It brings order to the chaos, or more accurately, to the chaos we call livestreaming.
It’s not about replacing human moderation; it’s about scaling it. It’s not about policing creativity; it’s about protecting investment. And it’s not about handing control to machines; it’s about giving humans better information, faster.
This technology marks the first time in the history of live media that advertisers can see, evaluate, and act while a broadcast is happening. That’s revolutionary.
A Future Built on Moments
I keep coming back to this idea of moments.
Moments are what make live different from any other medium. They’re unfiltered, unpredictable, and unforgettable. For brands, that’s both the opportunity and the fear.
AI finally lets us choose the moments we want to be part of.
If a brand wants to align with feel-good community wins, it can. If it wants to avoid volatility or sensitive topics, it can. The control moves from the aftermath to the moment itself.
And those moments don’t end when the stream does. They live on through clips, longform videos, and social recaps, multiplying the value of a single investment. One great organic moment can carry a brand across platforms for weeks.
That’s the future of brand safety in live; not walls, but windows. Not suppression, but selection.
And when you build that kind of infrastructure beneath livestreaming, you unlock everything above it: creativity, scale, and trust.
The Bigger Picture
Every new medium starts the same way: messy, unpredictable, full of promise. Then someone builds the rails, and suddenly it all clicks; creativity scales, investment follows, and the medium matures.
That’s what’s happening to livestreaming right now.
AI is building the rails.
The goal isn’t necessarily to wrap live content in bubblewrap; it’s to make it sustainable, for creators, brands, and audiences alike. Because when the infrastructure finally catches up to the creativity, live stops being a risk. It becomes the most human form of media there is.
