Twitch made a big announcement last week: it was expanding beyond just gaming videos and let's plays. It launched Twitch Creative, which was designed to show creative people doing creative things like drawing, painting, sculpting and anything else they can think of, in a bid to not only increase viewership, but to showcase some of the world's talents in a streaming, educational fashion.
To launch the platform, Twitch bought up the rights to classic TV painter and grandfather of ASMR, Bob Ross, who Twitch showed hosting his Joy of Painting TV series in its entirety over a nine day period. It proved to be incredibly popular, with thousands of regular viewers and millions throughout the stream period. Because of that, Twitch has now said it plans to stream the show every week for the foreseeable future.
This is a big move as Bob Ross' shows have been notoriously difficult to get for some time. While torrenters and sharers traded seasons between themselves and some were available at reasonably easy to get sources, this is the first time the Joy of Painting has been this accessible to so many and the fact that it's proving this popular is testament to how well it stands up.
Twitch won't be streaming the entirety of the Bob Ross catalogue all the time though. Instead it will showcase one series a week, starting at 3PM PST and running for around six hours. That means that re-runs will only happen about once every second months. That's how many series of that show Bob did.
Twitch will also stream a Bob Ross marathon to celebrate his birthday every year, streaming the entire catalogue of happy little accidents.
