Twitch, the popular live-streaming platform for gaming videos, announced on Thursday that it is expanding its Creative Channel to devote a main hub for artists and musicians where they, too, can post and watch live broadcasts.
The dedicated landing page located under the Twitch Creative header has its own director and carousel that will highlight the most interesting content from digital artists, painters, musicians and the like. Users will be able to include hashtags in their titles to make it easier for others to discover new content based on this area of interest.
"The Creative community was born from the gaming community on Twitch, as top broadcasters began broadcasting creation of fan art during gameplay down time," Bill Moorier, head of Twitch Creative, said in a release. "This attracted more broadcasters to the platform whose primary focus was on artistic endeavors. With their passion, variety, camaraderie, and sheer organic growth, they inspired us to put a much larger spotlight on their community."
And Twitch Creative is paying homage to one of the most iconic artists on TV for its launch by allowing users to stream all 403 episodes of Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting, so that you watch him paint happy little trees and clouds that are free to spark your own creativity. Users can watch Ross paint from from Oct. 26 to Nov. 6 in celebration of his birthday on twitch.tv/bobross.
After you have been soothed by watching Ross put a few do-ers in there, users can head over to twitch.tv/adobe to stream a full schedule of programming, or check out other artists from the platform's community include digital painter and illustrator Gees_art, professional costume artists Evilfx, and glass artist Vieparlafoi to provide content that will inspire, educate, and allow them to share their talents with the world.
Adobe is the the official launch sponsor of the new artist category in Twitch Creative.
"Creativity belongs to everyone. Adobe helps millions of creators share their imagination with the world. They inspire us," Mark Randall VP of creativity at Adobe, said in a release. "We are thrilled to help showcase the incredible work people are doing—and share their creative spark."
Moorier revealed that the idea to launch the art category for Twitch Creative came about two years ago when he noticed that users would stop playing games while their live-streams were going to use Adobe Photo to create game-related art. After tracking the numbers, artists were joining the community at about 40 percent a month. Users then began streaming videos of themselves making art, sculpting, and even building robotics, so it only made sense to feature this content in a centralized location.
To further include all forms of art, Twitch Creative will also feature a category for musicians to broadcast their original pieces.
"Since the specific act of crafting a song is as much a form of art as the other content under the Creative category, it made sense to migrate this singular use case over," Moorier said.
Twitch has about 2 million monthly viewers, with about a thousand active creators, and will now compete against YouTube Red.
Source: Twitch
