Cooking masterclasses, streamed in cinematic 4K.

The pitch was simple and the execution was not: put the world’s best chefs in front of a camera, and let anyone, anywhere, cook alongside them. The chefs and the cinematic production were handled — what was missing was the product, the software that had to make all of it feel effortless.

Streaming is an unforgiving medium. A lesson that takes three seconds to start, stutters on a kitchen tablet, or forgets where the viewer left off is a cancelled membership. And each class is far more than a video — it is a structured course: a dozen chaptered lessons, an hour-long documentary, a downloadable cookbook, and recipes that have to line up with the moment on screen.

Underneath the experience sat a business. The platform runs on memberships — a trial window, a 30-day money-back guarantee, annual billing, and a per-account device limit. None of that could be approximate. It had to be correct from the very first sign-up.

We built the platform as a full-stack Next.js application with a dedicated video pipeline at its core. Source footage is ingested, transcoded into an adaptive-bitrate ladder, and delivered from a CDN — so every player negotiates the sharpest quality the viewer’s screen and connection can carry, and steps down gracefully instead of buffering.

The content model treats a class the way a viewer experiences it: as a course. A chef owns a set of chaptered video lessons, a long-form documentary, recipe PDFs, and per-lesson recipes — all structured, all versioned. Publishing a new chef and class is a content operation, not an engineering one.

Playback state — progress, resume point, the current chapter — is synced server-side, so a lesson started on a phone during the commute continues exactly where it left off on the kitchen tablet that evening. One API feeds the responsive web app and the native mobile and TV apps, so it reads as a single product rather than three.

Memberships run on a billing layer wired to the payment provider: annual plans, the trial and money-back windows, renewals, and a device limit enforced at the session layer — an account streams on up to five screens, and no more.

The platform launched as a single product across web, mobile, and TV. Chefs’ classes stream in 4K, courses are structured and self-paced, and memberships bill correctly from the first sign-up — trials, renewals, refunds, and device limits all handled without anyone touching them.

Video starts fast and follows the viewer from screen to screen, and the catalogue grows on its own terms: a new chef, a new class, a new documentary is a content release, not a deploy. The engineering stays out of the way so the cooking can be the thing people show up for.