The problem
Ad-supported distribution runs on time-coded decisions: where the breaks go, which frame represents the title, where the intro ends and the credits begin. Today those decisions are made by hand, title by title, and they do not scale to a modern catalog.
- Operators scrub every title to place break markers, and a large licensed catalog can mean thousands of hours of content per quarter.
- Editorial policy lives in a document. The people placing markers interpret it differently, so the same policy produces different results on different days.
- Thumbnails get picked on gut feel, and the catalog ends up looking inconsistent across a season or a channel.
- Skip-intro and binge markers are either missing or hand-timed per episode.
- The output has to land in downstream systems as SCTE-35, VMAP, or WebVTT, which usually means another manual export step and another place for timecodes to drift.
Who it is for
- Broadcasters, streamers, and FAST channel operators monetizing large catalogs with advertising.
- Ad operations and media prep teams responsible for break placement and delivery metadata.
- Editorial and marketing teams who own the rules for what a break, a thumbnail, or a chapter is allowed to be.
The agents
Ceivo's agent catalog includes a set of ad operations and editorial automation agents that divide the work the way an experienced team would.
Editorial Rule Compiler turns your written ad policy and editorial standards into structured, versioned rules the other agents run against. Rules are expressed in plain language ("no breaks inside the cold open," "thumbnails show a lead cast member facing camera, never mid-blink") and compiled into an object the placement and selection agents can enforce. If a rule is ambiguous, the compiler says so and asks, rather than guessing. Every marker produced downstream records the rule version that produced it.
Ad Break Placement finds the right break points in a title. It starts from deterministic signals (shot boundaries, dips to black, silence, speech activity, music cues), scores the surviving candidates for narrative suitability, then hands the set to a placement solver that enforces your constraints: break counts, minimum intervals, protected zones, eligibility windows. Each marker carries a frame-accurate SMPTE timecode, a confidence score, and a short rationale a reviewer can read. If your constraints cannot all be satisfied, the agent reports which one is binding instead of quietly relaxing it.
Thumbnail Selection picks and crops key frames against the same compiled rules. It filters for technical quality first, evaluates the editorial predicates (who is in frame, how they are framed, what must never appear), then ranks options per aspect ratio. Exclusion rules are hard filters, not scoring penalties, so a frame that violates brand safety never reaches the ranked list.
Binge Markers detects recap, intro, content start, credits, and the next-episode cue. On episodic content it works at season level, using fingerprinting to find the segments that repeat across episodes, which is what the intro and credits are. Single episodes and specials fall back to a per-episode pass with an explicitly lower confidence.
Review Triage decides what a human sees. Markers above your confidence floor can auto-approve; everything else routes to a review queue ordered by expected review time rather than by title. This is the agent that turns a good model into an operational system, because your team spends its attention only where the agents were unsure.
Broadcast Metadata Publish converts approved markers into the format your downstream systems expect (SCTE-35, SCTE-104, VMAP, WebVTT, native JSON) and delivers them. It only publishes approved markers, validates timecodes before anything leaves the platform, and republishing never duplicates.
Season Orchestration coordinates the whole set across episodic content, so binge markers get season context, thumbnails stay varied across a season, and a partial failure on one agent never blocks the output of the others.
How they work together in the content lifecycle
The agents form a pipeline that mirrors how content actually moves.
Policy comes first, and only once. Your ad ops or editorial lead writes the rules in plain language and the Editorial Rule Compiler versions them. This is the same ownership model we described in The Business Owns the Agents: the person who knows the rule edits the rule, and the next run obeys.
When a title lands in the library, Ceivo already holds scenes, transcripts, and tags from ingest, the same understanding that powers compliance review and search-to-edit workflows. The advertising agents run on top of that substrate rather than re-indexing the content. Ad Break Placement, Thumbnail Selection, and Narrative Segmentation (which finds chapters and story boundaries, and feeds break candidates on unscripted and news content) run in parallel per title. On a series, Season Orchestration runs them with season-level context and adds Binge Markers.
Review Triage then splits the output. High-confidence markers move straight toward publish if your policy allows it. The rest queue for a human, who adjudicates with the rationale and the rule reference in front of them, in the same review-and-approval workflows our compliance customers use, with notifications a thread away in Slack or Teams.
Broadcast Metadata Publish closes the loop: approved markers go out to your ad server, playout, or packaging systems in the format each one expects.
Every operator action feeds back. Accepts, nudges, and rejects become labeled examples, and when reviewers keep nudging markers the same direction, that surfaces as evidence the rule needs an edit, not the model. The catalog of rules gets sharper with use, and it is your team doing the sharpening.
In practice
A FAST channel operator licenses a package of scripted series and needs the whole batch break-marked, thumbnailed, and delivered to their ad server. The editorial lead writes the break policy once and the compiler versions it. Season Orchestration runs each series: breaks placed within the eligibility windows, thumbnails ranked per aspect ratio, intro and credits found by fingerprint across each season. Review Triage routes the uncertain minority to an operator, who works a queue ordered by how long each decision will take. Approved markers publish as VMAP to the ad server and WebVTT chapters to the player. The operator reviewed a fraction of the catalog, and every marker in the batch traces back to a rule version and a rationale.
Why Ceivo
- The rules are yours, readable, versioned, and editable by the team that owns the policy, without an engineering ticket.
- Deterministic signal work and constrained placement stay deterministic, so results are reproducible and costs stay flat. The model is only consulted where judgment is required.
- One understanding of the content powers advertising, compliance, and production workflows alike, behind one governed door, in your own AWS account.
- Human review is built in where you want it and skipped where you do not, and the review record explains every decision after the fact.
Related
- The /agents directory, the full catalog these agents belong to
- Twenty New Agents in Two Months: A Tour of Ceivo's Spring 2026 Catalog
- The Business Owns the Brand. They Should Own the Agents Too.
- Broadcast and Advertising Compliance, the clearance side of the same workflows
- Governed AI Access, the policy layer underneath it all