The web series Epic Chef, which launched this Friday, is full of shouting, and bacon, and whiskey shots, and everything else that comes with Epic Meal Time‘s reputation as a bro-friendly alternative to the Food Network.

Epic Meal Time originated as a bunch of bored Canadians trying to replicate the most over-the-top meals they could — since then, it has grown into a massive online phenomenon, a celebration of gluttony that’s become one of YouTube’s more iconic series.

And Epic Chef should feel very familiar to Epic Meal Time fans: Excess is the name of the game, as competing chefs are judged by food and online personalities like Ace of Cakes‘s Duff Goldman, Freddie Wong, iJustine and Mystery Guitar Man on challenges bringing together meat, gravy, booze, deep-frying, and more meat.

According to Dan Weinstein of the Collective Digital Studio, which produced the series with the Epic Meal Time team, Epic Chef aims to appeal to the core demo of Epic Meal Time — men aged 17-34 — while also extending its reach.

“It’s the first of many projects designed to broaden the audience, extend the reach of the brand and continue to iterate on the content. It’s their first foray into longer form episodes and expanding their world of collaborators,” Weinstein said via email.

While the budget for Epic Chef exceeded that of typical Epic Meal Time episodes — “we were on location, had many more set pieces and participants and an expanded format,” Weinstein said — the first episode, “Breakfast Challenge,” has racked up almost 375,000 views in just one day. It probably helps that Epic Chef is being posted to Epic Meal Time‘s primary YouTube channel, which has 2.9 million subscribers.

What’s interesting about Epic Chef is this: It’s rare when a spin-off manages to take a show’s modus operandi (in Epic Meal Time‘s case, “when in doubt, add bacon — heaps and heaps of bacon”) and apply it to a different format and structure.

But perhaps because of the common language of food, and the pre-established traditions of food competition TV shows, Epic Chef easily replicates Epic Meal Time‘s established values while also incorporating new personalities and a new sense of drama. It’s a case study worth checking out, even for the vegetarians in the crowd.

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But on Thursday, one of cable TV’s stalwart programmers, Discovery Communications, answered in a big strategic way, acquiring Revision3, a top supplier of digital video to the above-mentioned platforms.

Silver Spring, Md.-based Discovery will pay about $30 million to acquire San Francisco-headquartered Revision3, a producer and distributor of popular digital programs including Epic Meal Time (pictured) and Tekzilla. Overall, Revision3 programming averages 23 million monthly unique viewers, spread across 27 channnels spanning platforms such as YouTube, Yahoo, AOL, CNET and Roku, just to name a few.

Over the last several years, Discovery has looked for ways to extend the programming of niche-focused channels like Science, Planet Green and Investigation Discovery to emerging internet platforms. Speaking to paidContent Thursday, a spokeswoman for the media company said Revision3 fills this need in several ways:

• While Discovery spends about $500,000 – $700,000 to produce an hour of cable TV programming, Revision3 has been able to produce popular shows for a digital scale that’s much less than that.
• Revision3 has also created science and technology programming that’s complementary to what Discovery already puts on its channels.
• A number of Revision3 hosts have shown the ability to draw an audience across platforms (the Discovery rep didn’t specify which ones the company likes in particular).

Each of Revision3′s 50 employees will be retained, the company will remain in San Francisco and CEO Jim Louderback will remain in charge of day-to-day operations. “They themselves are an attractive part of this deal,” the Discovery spokeswoman said.

Revision3 was founded in 2005 by Jay Aderlson and David Prager, and enjoyed two rounds of funding valued at around $10 million.

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