The Food Network aims to the be Peloton of cooking with live video broadcasting on Alexa. Director of Technology and Emerging Platforms at Discovery Inc., Tim McElreath, joins us to share how.

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Live video broadcasting on Alexa

The Food Network are working closely with Amazon to build out features for live video broadcasting on Echo Show devices and aims to be the Peloton of cooking.

Tim McElreath shares the story of what the Food Network is up to and how they see voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa shaping the future of engagement and content distribution in future. 

Through the Food Network app, you can pay a subscription to access premium content such as in-app live interactive cooking shows. This is what Tim is bringing to Alexa. Live cooking demonstrations with the ability for the audience to ask questions to Alexa and have those questions fed through to the presenter to be answered live.

We also discuss the process of making live broadcasting happen and how it's being built as first party functionality. That means that the Food Network aren't building a skill for this. Instead, they're sending a feed and metadata to Amazon for Alexa to distribute it directly. Is this a sign of the future? Moving away from skills and towards feeding Alexa content with metadata directly?

The Food Network aims to own the kitchen and Alexa is a big part of that. This episode will show you how Tim and his team are pursuing such goals and will have you thinking about how you can do the same.

Links

Try the Food Network skill (US only)

Connect with Tim on Twitter

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