Twitch gets creative

Twitch is streaming marathon of painter Bob Ross' TV show to celebrate its new focus on creative streamers [Image: Twitch]

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The world's largest video game-streaming platform has officially broadened its focus to creative people: mainly visual artists, craftspeople and musicians.

Amazon-owned Twitch on Wednesday announced its official support for the Twitch Creative Community, updating its rules of conduct to acknowledge this community and adding a new landing page for the creative category. The landing page features a video carousel highlighting interesting creative broadcasts.

Twitch's growing base of creative streamers largely consists of visual artists, craftspeople and musicians (whose streams must be live and feature visual as well as audio content). Popular tags (used for aggregating categories of content) on the new Creative landing page include #painting, #glassblowing and #Adobe. The creative software company is a launch partner for Twitch Creative.

Twitch Creative represents a promising new career avenue for musicians, artists and craftspeople, who now have a means of easily monetising their creative processes as well as their products. Twitch offers successful streamers a partnership by which they can earn a modest to massive living from subscription and advertising revenue.

Users can subscribe to their favourite partnered streams for $4.99 per month, giving them access to premium features such as exclusive chat zones in the stream and unlimited access to the streamer's broadcast archives. At least 50% of each monthly subscription fee goes to the streamer - more for more successful streamers, although Twitch is secretive about these percentages.

Over 100 of Twitch's top streamers amass hundreds of thousands of monthly subscribers, equalling hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in subscription fees alone. Partners can also earn money from ads played on their streams and once-off donations from viewers, of which Twitch does not take a cut.

To mark its creative push, Twitch is streaming a marathon of The Joy of Painting, a popular 1980s-90s US TV show featuring landscape painter Bob Ross guiding his audience step-by-step through a different landscape painting each 30-minute episode. The 403 episodes amount to over eight days of non-stop streaming, which began on 29 October: the late artist's 73rd birthday.

The stream - which has gained a cult following since it began on Thursday, consistently drawing tens of thousands of live watchers and close to two million unique views - highlights drastic shifts in media consumption patterns since Ross's death 20 years ago, in 1995.

Ross's conversation with his audience - speaking as though they were in the room with him - is ironically ideal for the streaming format in which streamers verbally converse with viewers, who occupy a shared virtual space via the stream's live chat.

On-screen, Ross discusses letters he has received from his audience, in much the same way as vloggers today respond to comments and questions they receive via Twitter. Ross also encourages his viewers to mail him photographs of their paintings, so he can create a collection - a precursor to food and craft bloggers pushing Instagram hashtags to curate their fans' creations.

At the time of writing, thousands of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram users continue to share Bob Ross-inspired memes, paintings and light-hearted Halloween costumes, as well as popular Ross quotes such as "we don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents".