Twitch Launches Food Channel with Four-Day Julia Child Marathon

By Mike Epstein March 15, 2016

twitch food launch child — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Twitch definitely isn’t just for video games anymore: The digital broadcasting service officially embraced another new non-gaming category, launching a round-the-clock channel for cooking- and food-based livestreams Tuesday. The new Twitch Food channel will live as a sub-section of Twitch’s new Creative category, the site’s home for non-gaming livestreams, which the service debuted in November 2015.

Though the channel has already begun broadcasting, Twitch will officially “launch” the channel Tuesday afternoon with a classic cooking TV marathon starring cooking show godmother Julia Child. The Twitch Food Channel will show all 201 episodes of Child’s PBS program, The French Chef. The broadcast starts at 2:00 pm PT and will last four days.

Launching the channel with Child echoes Twitch’s strategy for drawing viewers to the Creative channel, which kicked off with a nine-day marathon of Bob Ross’ show, The Joy of Painting, which drew 5.6 million viewers. The stream was so successful that Twitch now airs a full season of The Joy of Painting on the creative channel every Monday from 3-9:30 pm PT.

“Julia Child was the precursor to Twitch’s social cooking movement, making The French Chef show a great reminder about how visionary she was,” said Twitch Creative channel head Bill Morrier. “To put it in terms our community can relate to, Bob Ross is the Julia Child of painting.”

In addition to the Child archive, Twitch was quick to point out it has already cultivated a reservoir of food-themed broadcasters streaming on its platform under the larger Creative banner, including CookingForNoobs, Goldamsel, WorkingChef, Lulaboo, FakeGamerGirl, and DomesticDan, who started out streaming games and has moved to broadcasting chefs.

Meanwhile, Twitch is the latest company to bet that foodies will be the next fans to embrace livestreaming. Earlier this month, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced Nom, a mobile-focused livestreaming service made specifically for broadcasting food-based livestreams.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Michael is a New York-based tech and culture reporter, and a graduate of Northwestwern University’s Medill School of…

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