As a kid, Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting on PBS was my kryptonite. My parents knew that if they wanted thirty minutes of child-free silence, they’d switch on that quiet guy with the afro and I’d be freaking spellbound, up until every last titanium white cloud. Well today, Twitch announced it’s channeling that same appeal in its new service, which lets users zone out as they watch videos of artists making art.
It’s called Twitch Creative. Partnering with Adobe, Twitch announced today it has launched a new vertical that lets users watch artists instead of gamers. This content includes anything from painting and drawing to building and sculpting. Users can search hashtags to find exactly the videos they’re looking for: #animation, #robotics, #watercolor, #props, #woodworking. You get the idea.
Back in 2007, Twitch spun off from the YouTube-like, live-streaming site called Justin.TV, when the company noticed that there was a huge community of people sharing videos of video game conquests. And so, Twitch was born. (As Bob Ross would say, it was a happy accident.)
In the Twitch Creative press release, the company calls such videos “live social video.” Video game-watching videos have also been popular on YouTube for years, often called “Let’s Play [video game title here].”
It’s a solid, and lucrative, formula: Twitch was scooped up by Amazon for $1 billion last year. And as Jimmy Kimmel learned the hard way, people really like watching others do things like play games, and Google knows this: YouTube even announced its own Gaming app for video game video viewers. Maybe we’ll eventually see something like YouTube Art, as well?
We’ll see if fine arts will spark the same level of enthusiasm. For now, Twitch Creative’s first order of business? In collaboration with Janson Media and BobRoss Inc., they’ll air all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting, which you can watch here for the next eight-and-a-half days, which you can watch right here:
Watch live video from BobRoss on www.twitch.tv
[Twitch and Janson Media via The Verge]
Top image via Twitch Creative