Games streaming site Twitch expands into 24/7 food channel

Twitch has launched a new channel featuring 24/7 cooking content on Twitch Creative.

To celebrate the new offering, Twitch is running marathon of all 201 classic episodes of American Chef Julia Child on the new Twitch Food channel.

The Amazon-owned live-streaming service is hoping to expand beyond its core appeal to gamers, who tune in to watch other players’ real-time experiences.

The move coiuld be of significant interest to food and cooking brands, with a new avenue to reach a younger generation of consumers.

Julia Child, who died in 2004, was a popular author and TV chef in America in the 1970s and 1980s and all 201 episodes of her show The French Chef are being broadcast back-to-back to promote the new channel.

Currently, the Twitch stream of Child’s show had been watched more than 1.1 million times, with a bustling chat room discussing her tips for the perfect filet steak.

The channel will sit under Twitch’s “Creative” category, which launched in 2015 as a home for music, design and other kinds of broadcasters outside Twitch’s core focus on gaming streams.

The deal to screen Child’s TV show is not the first time Twitch has turned to a television veteran to promote its service. When it launched Twitch Creative, it ran a similar marathon of The Joy of Painting featuring US artist Bob Ross, and attracted 5.6 million viewers.

Amazon paid nearly $1bn to buy Twitch in 2014, reportedly beating YouTube owner Google in the process.

Read the Twitch blog post here