You have already gotten used to paying a cheaper rate on your subscription in exchange for watching ads. That model is about to take a new turn: artificial intelligence to detect which objects are “saleable” from what appears in the series you watch, to try to sell it to you. Similar to Prime Video advertising that leads to the corresponding sale on Amazon, but a step further in terms of sophistication.
What does it consist of? Warner Bros. Discovery announced on June 19 that HBO Max will launch in Spain and other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries (in addition to Brazil and Mexico in America), before the end of 2026, a new advertising format called Moments. The system uses artificial intelligence to detect the objects that appear on the screen during a series or movie and inserts advertisements linked to those objects in real time: if the protagonists use a bicycle, the advertisement can be for that bicycle, or an equivalent one. If the scene takes place on a flight, the following commercial break may carry an airline commercial.
Those responsible. The system is developed by the American company KERV.aiwhose technology already works with different applications for Disney, Hulu, Paramount, NBCU, ESPN, Samsung Ads or Vevo. Its proposal is object-by-object analysis of audiovisual content: it not only identifies the general theme of a scene, but also the specific visual elements that appear in it, with sufficient precision to correlate them with specific advertiser products.
25,000 moments. According to Warner, the system has already identified 25,000 moments in the HBO Max catalog where these types of ads can be activated. Thematic categories available to advertisers include cooking, fashion, beauty, luxury goods, fitness or well-being. In the United States, where Moments is already active, Warner has recorded a 19% increase in viewer engagement and a 13% increase in purchase intent compared to conventional advertising formats.
Juicier than product placement. The fact that a brand pays for its car to appear in a movie or its soft drink to be on the protagonists’ table requires a prior agreement between the brand and the production team, negotiated before filming. It is effective, but expensive (also at the organizational level). Moments, however, works on top of existing content. The AI detects the item and makes it part of advertising inventory. It is very attractive for advertisers and the platform: content shot five years ago can generate advertising impacts today.
All this theoretically, of course: no one has signed in blood that the series and films are not going to begin to modify their future content to try to get closer, precisely, to a 2.0 version of the product placement traditional, which worked with the same premise: what you see can be bought.
Amazon arrived first. In May 2025, Amazon announced in its annual presentation to advertisers a format of pause ads contextual for Prime Video. Amazon’s AI analyze the scene at the exact moment the viewer presses pause and generates in real time an ad with dynamic copy adapted to what appears on the screen. The difference with HBO is obvious, and in favor of Prime Video’s business: jumping from an ad to Amazon does not pose any problem for the viewer: according to company data88% of Prime Video viewers in the United States have purchased from Amazon, allowing you to introduce purchasing habits data into the equation.
No cookies. Warner, in fact, sells just the opposite. Moments’ press release highlights that the system uses “contextual signals instead of personal data”, meaning it uses a “privacy-first” design. Warner lacks the personal data that Amazon has, so it embraces this advantage for the user: it does not require tracking the user between sessions or building a profile. Moments doesn’t know who you are, only what you’re seeing at any given moment.
Advertisements on platforms streaming It is, increasingly, a very juicy business. According to studies As of August 2025, 45% of Netflix’s consumption in its ad-supported markets was already occurring from the ad-supported plan, up from 34% a year earlier. HBO Max recorded an increase of ten percentage points in the same period. That is, the proportion of viewers who watch streaming with advertising it does not stop growing, and Moments arrives at a time when this advertising inventory is crying out for more sophisticated ways to cajole the viewer.
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