The Discovery Channel is uniting The Food Network and Alexa

By Clayton Moore Published September 25, 2019

Food Network is launching a fancy new subscription service with TV personalities like Giada DeLaurentis and Alton Brown, all tied to Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant. The Food Network-Alexa partnership takes advantage of the Echo Show’s capabilities to play on-demand videos that include exclusive recipe instructions from the likes of the above-mentioned celebrity chefs as well as Bobby Flay and Guy Fieri, among others.

Food Network Kitchen is going to be a streaming service that will cost $7 a month. For your hard-earned dollars, you get recipes, cooking shows, and live cooking sessions, among other benefits, starting in October for both Android and iOS users.

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“We think we can set a new bar in the direct-to-consumer world that goes beyond entertainment,” Peter Faricy, CEO of Discovery’s Direct-to-Consumer business unit, said in a release. “We’re going to stress the joy and fun — and also the practicalness — of this.”

Amazon’s Alexa is the Food Network’s exclusive voice service so if you’re down with the dulcet tones of DeLaurentis’ swimmingly charming voice or Brown’s captivating expertise, this is definitely going to be your thing.

Discovery’s infiltration into the Alexa ecosphere isn’t a minor investment. This deal gets the Food Network and likely other Discovery properties into smart home products that run Alexa, including Amazon’s smart speakers, the newly available Echo Show, Fire TV, and smart TVs that are pre-equipped with Fire TV. In 2020, the streaming platform will expand to Apple TV and Roku.

For those of you who suffer through incessant commercials on your chosen podcast, Discovery is framing access to The Food Network as a Peloton for cooking — a communal class you do at home but connect to others online. The Food Network Kitchen will offer 25 live cooking classes per week, with celebrity chefs like Daniel Boulud among them.

Via Alexa, Food Network Kitchen’s users will be able to ask our the digital assistant to browse the service’s recipes, access live and on-demand cooking classes, view how-to videos and work through step-by-step recipes on the new Echo Show, complete with voice commands like “Alexa, go to the next step.”

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Clayton Moore’s interest in technology is deeply rooted in the work of writers like Warren Ellis, Cory Doctorow and Neal…

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