Cinedigm brings Bob Ross Spanish-language FAST channel to Roku leveraging AI

Cinedigm is one of the partners bringing Spanish language content to The Roku Channel’s just launched Espacio Latino offering, leveraging AI technology to launch The Bob Ross Channel en Español FAST channel on the platform.

A Spanish dubbed version of the free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) linear channel of the iconic painting series features a fully localized audio language track that utilizes a synthetic voice Cinedigm says is imperceptible from a human voice and is a complimentary match to the soft and novel tone of Ross’s voice. Bringing a Spanish-language version brings the series to an entirely new audience, according to Cinedigm, which is the exclusive distributor of the Bob Ross Channel, noting an exponential increase in the demand for culturally diverse programming.

“AI technology has allowed Cinedigm to break barriers across language so that the beloved series can be widely enjoyed.  As the demand for Spanish language content continues to grow, we wanted to share one of our most popular channels with a whole new audience,” said Jennifer Soltesz, VP of Business Development & Strategy at Cinedigm, in a statement. “With The Roku Channel’s incredible reach and Bob Ross’s long-lasting popularity, this presents a tremendous opportunity to extend his brand to Spanish-speaking audiences.”

Last year Cinedigm partnered with U.K.-based AI startup Papercup to adapt the iconic Bob Ross series “The Joy of Painting” by dubbing it with Latin America Spanish for the first time.

Cinedigm said it was looking for hyper-accurate matching in order “to catch all of Ross’s sweet phrases and sounds that traditional translators often miss” as well as something that was scalable to efficiently localize hundreds of hours of content into various languages – with the ultimate goal of expanding distribution of the TV series to audiences around the globe.

Papercup’s service automates the time-consuming parts of the dubbing process by using machine translation and synthetic speech that’s been extensively trained via machine learning, doing so across all 31 seasons of the series’ content.

“The entertainment industry is undergoing substantial technological change across the entire supply chain. This new breed of AI-based tools now at our disposal offer tremendous opportunities often only available to the major Hollywood studios,” said Tony Huidor, Chief Technology & Product Officer at Cinedigm, told Fierce Video. “We expect artificial intelligence and machine learning to continually evolve and be utilized to eliminate scalability issues that previously limited content companies from expanding their distribution worldwide.”

According to Huidor, Cinedigm is looking to expand use of the technology across other languages as well as implement it across other types of content. Specifically, it’s evaluating Brazilian Portuguese, Castilian Spanish and German.

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“A project like this is exactly why we built our technology - unlocking hundreds of hours of quality content stuck in a single language with our speech translation system,” said Jesse Shemen, CEO and co-founder at Papercup, in October when the partnership was announced. “It's validating to see our technology work at such a large scale across multiple languages and enable the introduction of strong branded content to a new global audience.”

Bringing the FAST channel to The Roku Channel expands Cinedigm’s reach of its most popular channel, as Roku’s free to watch aggregated platform hit an estimated 80 million people in U.S. households as of the fourth quarter.

Cinedigm is among existing partners bringing content to The Roku Channel’s new Spanish-language hub Espacio Latino. New partners bolstering Spanish programming for the new offering include NBCUniversal Telemundo, Hemisphere Media Group, Cisneros Media, Eurochannel, The Weather Channel en Español, and Canela.TV.