SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Twitch, the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers, today announced a bigger and broader focus on its swiftly growing Creative community. The category is now getting its own dedicated landing page under the Twitch Creative header and is now officially recognized as a content area the brand is actively supporting.
To honor the memory of one of the most popular and influential artists to grace the television screen, Twitch is launching the new category on Bob Ross’ birthday. Twitch has secured the rights to broadcast Bob Ross’ entire The Joy of Painting archive. All 403 episodes will be broadcast on Twitch from October 29-November 6 on twitch.tv/bobross.
“The Creative community was born from the gaming community on Twitch, as top broadcasters began broadcasting creation of fan art during gameplay down time,” said Bill Morrier, Head of Twitch Creative. “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.”
Like the front page of Twitch, Creative now has its own directory and carousel for highlighting the best and most interesting content in the category. Unique to the Creative category, Twitch enables artists to put hashtags in their broadcast titles, providing viewers an intuitive way to browse and discover channels based on their preferences.
Adobe is the official launch sponsor of the new Twitch Creative category. They are partnering with artists from the Twitch community on their Creative channel at twitch.tv/adobe to provide a full schedule of programming, inviting everyone to get inspired by the amazing things creative people can do.
“Creativity belongs to everyone. Adobe helps millions of creators share their imagination with the world. They inspire us,” said Mark Randall, vice president of creativity at Adobe. “We are thrilled to help showcase the incredible work people are doing – and share their creative spark.”
Illustrating the diversity of art on Twitch Creative are individuals such as Geers_art (digital painter/illustrator), Evilfx (professional prop/costume artist), SceneOfActionMusic (music composer) and Vieparlafoi (glass artist). Some of these broadcasters also play games, but their artistic endeavors are stellar examples of the Twitch Creative community in action.
To further the brand’s commitment to the art community, Kyle “MonkeyOnStrike” Reddington--one of the category’s established artists--was recently hired as Creative’s new community manager. As a broadcaster known for his traditional oil painting, Kyle understands the community from a first-hand perspective.
Because music creation has experienced its own renaissance on Twitch and Twitch Creative goes beyond traditional forms of art, the Creative category will also become the new home for music composition.
“As we've watched our beta Music category take shape, among the most popular broadcasts are musicians creating original compositions,” adds Moorier. “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.”
For Twitch Creative news follow @TwitchCreates on Twitter and for general company and community news, visit the Twitch blog, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages.
About Twitch
Twitch is the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers. Each month, more than 100 million community members gather to watch and talk about video games with more than 1.7 million broadcasters. Twitch’s video platform is the backbone of both live and on-demand distribution for the entire video game ecosystem. This includes game developers, publishers, media outlets, events, user generated content, and the entire esports scene. Twitch also features Twitch Creative, a category devoted to artists across an array of mediums. For more information visit the Twitch website and blog.
