AI at Bitmovin

Bitmovin is built for AI-augmented developers. Point your AI agent — Claude, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT — at Bitmovin and have it build, encode, and operate your video workflows directly. This page is the entry point.

Beyond the agent experience, Bitmovin also ships AI products of its own: AI Scene Analysis for video metadata, and the Bitmovin Assistant for in-dashboard chat.

Bitmovin skill — drop us into your AI agent

bitmovin.com/skill is the one-prompt way to give any AI coding agent context on Bitmovin's full product suite. Two paths:

Paste into your AI:

Learn about Bitmovin from bitmovin.com/skill

Or run in your terminal:

npx @bitmovin/skills

The wizard detects your AI tool (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot) and installs the canonical Bitmovin skill into the right place. After that, your agent knows how to use Player, VOD/Live Encoding, Observability, AI Scene Analysis, Streams, and Stream Lab — and will walk you through connecting the MCP server below.

Source: github.com/bitmovin/skills.

The Bitmovin MCP server

We expose Bitmovin over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so you can connect it to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any other MCP-compatible client and use Bitmovin alongside your other tooling.

There is one endpoint:

https://mcp.bitmovin.com

One URL, one sign-in, every Bitmovin product. Tools are namespaced by product so your agent can pick the right one without name collisions.

What's inside

Which tools you actually see depends on what your API key or account has access to.

Authentication

OAuth is the default and the recommended path. Add the server URL and your client walks you through a browser sign-in; no key handling, and access is scoped to your Bitmovin account.

For headless use — CI, scripts, shared automation — you can present a Bitmovin API key instead.

Send an API key as Authorization: Bearer <key>, not as x-api-key.
The hosted endpoint sits behind an edge that requires an Authorization header on every request and will reject an x-api-key-only request with 401 before it reaches the server.

Multi-org accounts: add x-tenant-org-id: <id> alongside your key to target a sub-organization. Note that the organization is fixed for the lifetime of a connection — to switch orgs, reconnect (and, on the OAuth path, sign in again).

Connecting

Three ways in, depending on how you work.

1. Command line (Claude Code and similar)

claude mcp add bitmovin --transport http https://mcp.bitmovin.com

Run /mcp inside Claude Code to complete the browser sign-in, and claude mcp list to verify.

To use an API key instead of OAuth:

claude mcp add bitmovin --transport http https://mcp.bitmovin.com \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BITMOVIN_API_KEY"

2. Desktop config file

Claude Desktop's config file starts MCP servers as local processes, so point it at the server through mcp-remote, which bridges a remote HTTP endpoint to a local one.

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows) and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bitmovin": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.bitmovin.com"]
    }
  }
}

Then fully quit and relaunch Claude Desktop. On first use, mcp-remote opens a browser to sign you into Bitmovin and caches the tokens.

To use an API key instead:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bitmovin": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.bitmovin.com",
        "--header",
        "Authorization:${BITMOVIN_AUTH}"
      ],
      "env": {
        "BITMOVIN_AUTH": "Bearer YOUR_BITMOVIN_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Note there is no space after Authorization:. Claude Desktop on Windows and Cursor don't escape spaces inside args when launching the process, which mangles the header value — passing the value through env, where spaces are safe, avoids it.

The same shape works for Cursor, Windsurf, and other clients that launch MCP servers as local processes. Check your client's MCP documentation for the exact file location.

3. Custom connector (Claude organization settings)

Best for teams: an admin adds Bitmovin once and everyone in the organization gets it, with no local install and no API keys to distribute.

1. In Claude, go to Settings → Connectors. Organization owners and admins will also see an organization-level connector section.
2. Click Add custom connector.
3. Enter the URL https://mcp.bitmovin.com and save.
4. Each member clicks Connect and signs in with their Bitmovin account. Access is scoped to that member's own Bitmovin permissions.

Because this path is OAuth-only, it doesn't carry custom headers — multi-org users targeting a sub-organization should use one of the header-based options above.

ChatGPT

Bitmovin is available as an official app in the ChatGPT app directory — no MCP URL to copy:

1. Go to chatgpt.com/apps.
2. Search for Bitmovin.
3. Click Connect.
4. Sign in with your Bitmovin account — you can start chatting immediately.

Bitmovin CLI — manage everything from your terminal

The Bitmovin CLI is the terminal companion to the dashboard and the MCP server. It covers encoding templates and jobs, inputs/outputs, codec configurations, player licenses, and Analytics queries — ideal for scripting, automation, and CI/CD pipelines.

npm install -g @bitmovin/cli
bitmovin config set api-key YOUR_API_KEY

What it covers:

• Encoding templates — create, validate, start, and monitor YAML-based workflows
• Encoding jobs — list, start, stop, and monitor with live progress
• Inputs/Outputs — manage S3, GCS, Azure, and HTTP storage connections
• Codec configs — list and inspect H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9, and audio configurations
• Player licenses — list and manage license keys and allowed domains
• Analytics — query playback metrics, impressions, and license info

Requires Node.js 20+. Public Beta. Full command reference and install instructions in the bitmovin/cli repo.

AI Scene Analysis

AI Scene Analysis (AISA) is Bitmovin's flagship AI product. It transforms video content into rich, structured metadata by analyzing every scene for context, themes, and visual characteristics — making every content minute discoverable, reusable, and advertisable.

AISA runs as part of your encoding workflow and produces per-scene metadata including:

• Scene boundaries with start/end timestamps
• Summaries and descriptions of each scene
• Visual elements — objects, brands, settings, locations, characters
• Mood and atmosphere — lighting, time of day, weather, sentiment
• IAB taxonomy classifications and keywords for contextual ad targeting
• Sensitive topic flags and content ratings
• Multi-language support — analyze in any language, output in multiple languages

Use cases

• Intelligent ad placement — automatic SCTE marker insertion and keyframe placement at natural scene boundaries, with contextual ad matching via IAB taxonomies. Integrates with AWS MediaTailor, Broadpeak, and SpringServe.
• Content discovery — feed scene-level metadata into recommendation engines and search.
• Operational automation — highlights extraction, metadata generation, subtitle and caption workflows.
• Player enhancements — contextual overlays and interactive features powered by scene metadata.
• Performance analytics — correlate viewer engagement with scene context to identify what works.

To get started, see the full AI Scene Analysis documentation.

Bitmovin Assistant

The Bitmovin Assistant is a chat-based AI assistant built into the Bitmovin Dashboard. It gives you a single conversation surface for navigating the product, inspecting your encodings, searching documentation, finding SDK examples, and querying your Observability data.

No setup required — sign in and start asking questions at dashboard.bitmovin.com/assistant.

Under the hood

• The Bitmovin skill is plain markdown served from bitmovin.com/skill and installed into your agent's local context — no model or service runs on Bitmovin's side for skill use.
• The MCP server does not ship any AI model. It is a tool server — your chosen MCP client's model does the reasoning. mcp.bitmovin.com validates your OAuth token or API key, namespaces tools by product, and forwards each call to the service that owns it.
• AI Scene Analysis runs during encoding and produces structured metadata — no separate service to manage.
• The Bitmovin Assistant uses its own LLM behind the scenes — see Bitmovin Assistant for details.

Data handling

• The Bitmovin skill is static markdown — no user data, no requests back to Bitmovin when an agent reads it.
• The MCP server doesn't persist user data. It verifies your credential, forwards the call, and returns the result.
• Documentation tools use only public Bitmovin documentation and public SDK example repositories, and need no account.
• Encoding, Observability, Stream Lab, and Support tools scope every call to the credential you present — they can only see data your account already has access to.
• Player tools are stateless — they accept a stream URL and player config from the chat client and return a rendered player; your stream URLs are not persisted.
• AI Scene Analysis processes your video content during encoding. The generated metadata is stored with your encoding output and is accessible via the Bitmovin API.