IFood.tv is coming to a TV near you

If you were looking for a channel all about wine, this is the place for you

Learn the name iFood.tv. The way this company is expanding, it might just be a household name soon.

Just a week after launching its Android app and updating its iPhone app so that it now has AirPlay support to let you watch recipe videos on AppleTV, iFood.tv is planning on launching apps for TV platforms on Samsung, Google and Yahoo.

The online cooking website already launched on Roku in November.

Menlo Park, Calif-based iFood.TV, which launched in 2007 by Vikrant Mathur and Alok Ranjan, has four million unique visitors a month, with users in 227 different countries. The site, which has been bootstrapped, contains over 10,000 blogs, over 25,000 instructional cooking videos and over 150,000 text recipes. 

Mathur told VatorNews that he approaches his style of cooking entertainment in a different way than other TV channels, like the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, in that he sees his videos as educational rather than entertainment. He is going to organize the website’s content into channels that will cater to a specific type of food. For example, there is a channel focused completely on wine. There are videos for how to pick a wine, how to open a bottle, a video about vineyards; essentially anything that a person would want to know about wine would be right at their fingertips.

While the big cable channels have focused on the big brands, like Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse, Mathur sees his website, not as an alternative to those channels, but as something completely different. Professional chefs, restaurant owners and cookbook writers, submit the videos produced on his site but they are all part of a community that can cater to specific audience that will not usually find content that caters to them. For example, there will be a channel for vegan food, and one for raw food, which Mathur says the big cable networks will not offer since people who need this type of content are out of the mainstream. He wants to “tap into the long term nature” of the business, where users can find their own niche channels that cater to them, and not have to wade through content produced for mass audiences.

So how will expanding into this new platform affect business?

Mathur told me he expects to have iFood.tv on eight to 15 million TV boxes by the end of next year, with three to fiven video streams per month by the end of this year. He also predicts that the number of video streams on the website to double from the current number of around six million per month to 10-12 million by the end of the year.

Mathur sees his potential audience as people fed up with the cable channels, and who want to really learn something about food. As he said told VatorNews, “I have never met anyone who ever said, ‘I found this great recipe on the Food Network.’” On iFood.TV, though, it would seem to be impossible not to find something you’ve never tried before.

(Image source: ifood.tv)