On Friday, Rich Valdes announced he is joining Raul Acostaโs Festiva TV on Roku, which will utilize AI to translate his content into Spanish for Latin American and Caribbean audiences.
Barrett Media caught up with Valdes to talk about the new initiative and the role AI is playing on his show.
Krystina Carroll: Congratulations on the syndication! Tell me more about this new venture. Your show is going to be AI-dubbed in Spanish? This is blowing my mind. Tell me how this came about.
Rich Valdes: I was helping Curtis Sliwa with his mayoral campaign and got in touch with Raul Acosta (Oro Solido), who was interested in endorsing Curtis Sliwa. We started talking, and he was like, โYeah, look, Iโm a fan of yours. Iโve seen you on TV, and you do great work.โ I was like, โOh, thanks. I had no idea you even knew who I was.โ
We hung out one time, then had a meeting, and he said to me, โYou know, I have a TV network that is popular in the Caribbean and Latin America that we use to promote our music content. Weโve also just gotten into doing some news โ international news from Latin America and the Caribbean โ but we donโt have much from a United States perspective. We could really use that type of commentary because of all the changes weโre seeing.โ This was before Maduro was arrested, but the writing was on the wall. With the election of Javier Milei and the Bolivian president, there seems to be a shift toward the right in many Latin American countries.
Oro Solido said, โI think conservative commentary would be good,โ and he added that they could translate my content through AI.
(A note: Valdes speaks fluent Spanish, but translating the show through AI would avoid him having to do a second show.)
RV: I also wanted to get into more of the streaming television and video-sharing side of the industry with Rumble and YouTube. Itโs a different world today than it was even three or four years ago. In the…