Twitch embraces the arts with Creative category, Bob Ross marathon

The company has additionally partnered with Janson Media in order to stream a marathon session of Bob Ross’s classic public television series, The Joy of Painting.

In the past, Twitch frowned upon the production of non-gaming content, and regularly policed streams suspected of straying from the site’s primary focus. This rigid enforcement of content reached a boiling point among Twitch’s community with the launch of the PlayStation 4 app The Playroom in 2013. Streamers producing non-gaming talk shows and other content via The Playroom were often booted from the service, and risked having their accounts permanently suspended.

Twitch has since reversed its stance, and streamers participating in the newly established Creative category can now produce as much non-gaming content as they wish. Currently accepted forms of artistic expression on Twitch include drawing, crafting, animation, robotics, and music production.

“We’ve updated our Rules Of Conduct to reflect our official embrace of the Creative community,” Twitch’s Head of Creative Bill Moorier stated. “In short, we encourage you to broadcast your creative process on Twitch, be that visual art, woodworking, costume creation, prop building, music composition, or any other process in which you entertain and connect around a creative activity. We understand that this is vague. We expect to learn much about what is, and is not, appropriate for Twitch as the community grows.”

To encourage its users to dabble in the arts, Twitch now hosts a dedicated Creative landing page that promotes a rotating series of channels featuring popular streamers and partner companies like Adobe.

Twitch Creative launches today with a marathon of the PBS instructional series The Joy of Painting. All 403 episodes of the series will be streamed back-to-back starting today, October 29 at 2 p.m. PST and ending on November 7.