Best video moderation APIs in 2026

Bottom line: video moderation is the area where vendors differ most. AWS Rekognition handles large stored videos asynchronously. Hive and Sightengine's Pro plan accept live streams. Moderation API lists video alongside its review queue. Supervisor, our own product, is best for short user-uploaded clips where you want timestamps per flagged frame and the same labels and plan you already use for text and images, but it has tight limits (60 seconds, 10 MB) and no live-stream support. Pick by clip length and whether you need streams.

Checked against vendor docs on 26 October 2026. We have not benchmarked accuracy or processing speed.

Who supports video

Supervisor

Best for: short clips posted by users in communities and apps, where you want to know which moment tripped a flag.

Send base64 video to POST /api/moderation/user/video. Limits: 10 MB, 60 seconds, a maximum of 20 frames analysed. The response includes flagged, the labels, and a per-frame list with timestamp_ms, so you can show a moderator the exact moment. The frames are classified with the same 16 labels as text and images, and video is included in the one plan (£13.99 a month). Video frames are billed at 25 percent of the image per-byte rate. The SDKs wrap it in one call and check the size limit locally. In Discord it is a dashboard toggle, off by default. Read more in our launch post.

Limits are real: a 60 second cap and 10 MB mean long or high-resolution videos need trimming or compressing first, and we do not offer live-stream moderation. We have also not published accuracy numbers for video.

AWS Rekognition

Best for: large stored video libraries on AWS.

Asynchronous: you call StartContentModeration and then GetContentModeration. Stored videos must be H.264 in MPEG-4 or MOV, up to 10 GB and 6 hours, with up to 20 concurrent jobs per account. Price in the AWS offer data is $0.10 per minute of archived video for US East (USD). The streaming video features we found do not include moderation. Rekognition also states its moderation APIs don't detect illegal content such as CSAM.

Hive

Best for: moderation that has to include live streams, via a sales conversation.

Hive samples video at one frame per second by default (adjustable) and passes the frames to its visual model; live streams over RTMP or HLS are sampled the same way. Formats: mp4, webm, avi, mkv, wmv, mov. Video moderation is off until you fill in Hive's contact form, billed "at special video rates" that its pricing page does not state. Its newer vision-language model docs mention video-only and text-plus-video input.

Sightengine

Best for: teams that want video and live moderation on a published plan.

Starter allows videos up to 50 MB with no live-stream support. Pro allows 500 MB plus live moderation. Custom frame rates run 0.5 to 2 fps on Starter and Pro and 0.1 to 10 fps on Enterprise. Concurrent video jobs: 1 on Starter, 5 on Pro. Starter is $29 and Pro $99 a month; video and live-stream per-operation pricing is not stated on the page we read.

Moderation API

Best for: teams that want video in a platform with a review queue.

Moderation API lists video among its content types. Its homepage says video units start at 3 and rise with length and the number of models enabled. We did not find size or length limits.

What to ask before you commit

1. How long are your clips? A 60 second limit suits short-form uploads and not films.
2. Do you need live streams? Only some vendors cover them, and some only on higher plans.
3. How is it billed? Per minute, per frame, per unit or per byte differ, so price your own average clip.
4. What do you get back? Per-frame timestamps are far more useful to a moderator than a single verdict.

Sources

Supervisor video launch, Rekognition moderation, Rekognition limits, Hive FAQ, Hive visual moderation, Hive pricing, Sightengine pricing, Moderation API, OpenAI.

Try a clip in the live demo, read the API reference, or create a free account.