Pairing Televisa Univision, a culturally-local but language-constrained media company, with the AI dubbing startup ElevenLabs let its Spanish-language content be redistributed globally in different languages and accents within a couple of months, culminating in a major deal with Netflix.
Ben recounts how a16z connected Televisa Univision's CEO with ElevenLabs to dub his Spanish-language content into other languages while preserving actors' authentic performances, quickly expanding his global reach and leading to a Netflix deal. ✦ AI generated
Ben Horowitz · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-03 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 12:01
we've got this great company, 11 Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together in a couple of months. He was in France and Poland and all over the world with this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as they normally do with their right kind of intonations, their right laugh, everything but in different languages. And he recently based on that success got a big deal with Netflix.
verbatim transcript · starts at 12:01
12:01know, he's like, you know, how should we solve this? And we're like, well, we've got this great company, 11 Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together in a couple of months. He was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world with uh this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as they normal do with their right kind of intonations, their
12:24right laugh, everything but in different languages. And he recently um based on that success got a big deal with Netflix. Yeah. Uh and so here we have um something where we can bring our partners who you know have a great product uh that's culturally local but really really interesting and make it a global product by you know not competing uh with their allies but partnering with their allies and and I think that's a
12:55lot of what the program is about >> and I want to tie what Benja said back to the values point because people often ask us you know Chinese open source models, how do you compare and contrast? So in that case, they didn't have to worry that when the content was dubbed into different languages that if the speaker said something sensit sensitive about tanaman square or sensitive regarding the Chinese government that
13:21using an American model that content would be translated and changed along the way, right? They knew it would be true to what was said. And that's what we mean when we talk about American values of not censoring, not injecting political will into how these models operate in the way that one would contrast. Now, open source is something we we deeply value because at the end of the day, there's all different kinds of
13:48models and all different kinds of price points clearly. Yeah. Um but that's really a good example of what we mean when we say American and western values reflected in the models that we deploy around our infrastructure. >> For sure the te nollas are spicy enough. I don't know how much the introduction of tenement square needs to be introduced necessarily in the story line but you never know the border crossings