Amazon held its 2019 launch today (September 25, 2019), revealing a slew of new products set to enter the market. One of them is a service coming to Echo and Alexa thanks to a partnership between Amazon and Discovery, called Food Network Kitchen.
The US subscription streaming service aims to provide an entertaining platform for home cooks, and will be providing cooking classes plus episodes of upcoming shows on demand. Instructional videos will be split into steps, with Alexa also having the ability to overlay useful information on the screen.
Food Kitchen Network is set to launch in October and will be priced at $6.99 per month. To start with there will be 25 weekly live and interactive cooking shows. Familiar celebrity faces you’ll see in the kitchen will include Bobby Flay – who gave his endorsement of the service at Amazon’s launch event – Rachael Ray, Giada De Laurentiis and Guy Fieri.
What’s more, there will be over 800 on-demand instructional videos and a whopping 80,000 recipes to sift through. Subscribers will be able to view original programming related to the culinary industry, along with select shows from Food Network’s library.
Watching content won’t be the only feature of this new streaming services. Subscribers will be able to order ingredients for the recipes they want using online grocery services. In 2020, there are even plans for a 24 hour culinary helpline, so subscribers can obtain tips from experts live.
The service will be available for iOS and Android mobile devices when it launches, with additional compatibility coming to additional platforms and devices such as Roku and Apple TV in 2020.
Other streaming products revealed at the Amazon launch include the Echo Show 8 and the Alexa Smart Screen SDK going up to version 2.0, providing a higher quality experience for devices such as Facebook Portal and Sony TV.
It’s expected that the launch will have a positive impact on Amazon stock. September 23rd saw it lose 0.5% after Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak reiterated an ‘overweight’ rating. The stock remained in negative territory yesterday (September 24, 2019).
The past 12 months has seen AMZN stock down almost 12%, which lags every member of the FAANG stock group except Netflix, with NFLX stock down over 31% within this timeframe.
