Julia Child to Inaugurate Popular Gaming Platform Twitch's New Cooking Channel Twitch is the second streaming platform to get into the food space this month, a week after the launch of Steve Chen's Nom.
By Nina Zipkin
Popular social live-streaming gaming platform Twitch is taking a page out of The Food Network's recipe book and today announced the launch of a channel dedicated to cooking and baking. The channel is kicking off with a four-day marathon of the entire 201 episode run of Julia Child's beloved cooking show The French Chef.
Twitch had previously streamed the entire run of Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting -- more than 400 episodes -- over the course of a week. Some 5.6 million viewers tuned in.
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Bill Morrier, head of Twitch Creative, explained in a press release why beginning with Julia Child was a natural fit for the channel. "Julia Child was the precursor to Twitch's social cooking movement, making The French Chef show a great reminder about how visionary she was. To put it in terms our community can relate to, Bob Ross is the Julia Child of painting."
Twitch isn't the only new video entrant in the food space. Just last week, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and former YouTube engineering lead Vijay Karunamurthy launched an interactive streaming platform for foodies and chefs called Nom.
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And the trend isn't only relegated to cooking, but to eating as well. In South Korea, people can pull down as much as $10,000 a month though Mukbang, where users live stream and chat with viewers during meals.
Twitch was founded in 2011 by CEO Emmett Shear and was bought by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. As of 2015, the site boasted an average of 100 million monthly viewers around the world. At the end of the year, the company reported that altogether, Twitch users had streamed 241,441,823,059 minutes, or more than 459,000 years of video.
