“Life itself is the proper binge,” Julia Child famously said. Little did she know that 50 years later, viewers would get to binge on her iconic cooking show in an entirely different way.
Twitch, the Amazon-owned live video platform, just announced Twitch.tv/Food, a new channel featuring 24/7 cooking content on Twitch Creative. To celebrate the new offering, Twitch is running a mouthwatering marathon of all 201 episodes of The French Chef, the famous PBS cooking show, in which Child helped a generation of timid cooks conquer their fears in the kitchen.
In November, the streaming giant launched Twitch Creative, a platform for graphic designers, artists, chefs, and just about any other “creative” you can imagine, to share their works online. Twitch kicked off the launch with a hugely successful marathon of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. About 5.6 million viewers tuned in to watch the groovy ’70s uncle help us paint happy little trees and majestic mountains.
The Bob Ross stream was so successful that Twitch Creative began streaming episodes every Monday. Launching a food channel with another retro PBS star is a logical next step, building on the success of their last marathon event.
Twitch announced the new food channel in a blog post, noting that many users already live stream their creations in the kitchen. The Twitch team will be highlighting food streamers all week, including CookingForNoobs, who created the Bob Ross-inspired lasagna below — a perfectly meta representation of all that is Twitch Creative.
Amazon purchased Twitch in 2014, when the site was primarily used for streaming video games. It’s clear that both Twitch and its parent company want to take a big bite out of the video streaming market, going up against the likes of YouTube and Netflix. In addition to its Amazon Video service, Amazon last week launched its first live daily e-commerce show on Amazon.com, Style Code Live.
