Introducing Twitch Creative
“They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers — just to upset the critics.” — Bob Ross
Hi, my name is Bill.
I was the second employee at Twitch, back in 2007. I can’t quite claim to have been around at the very beginning of live internet video streaming, but I was around to see its mass adoption.
It’s been an amazing privilege to watch live video grow up. From the really early days when what we were doing was only just barely possible, through a time when it worked but nobody could really figure out what to use it for, to the amazing rocket ship that is Twitch.
Twitch really started to work when we noticed a particularly determined community of video gamers who were doing something extraordinary. They were sharing their passion for video games via an entirely new medium: live social video. We decided to do everything we could to support this burgeoning community, and immersed ourselves in the gaming world. Today, there are millions of broadcasters on Twitch, with many of the most dedicated making a comfortable living doing so.
All along, the Twitch community has included a determined community of artists, crafters and builders, who have been using Twitch to broadcast their creative processes. These creative broadcasters share many of the same characteristics as all Twitch broadcasters: passion, engagement, and a community-centric worldview.
Today, we’re happy to announce our official support for the Twitch Creative community. There are a few things that make the Creative category unlike anything else on Twitch, so we, along with our launch partner Adobe, are excited to see what you dream up.
First, starting today, you’ll see an entirely new landing page for the Creative category. This includes a dedicated Featured Video carousel meant to highlight interesting creative broadcasts for the community.
Second, you may have noticed a unique tagging system on the Creative category that quietly launched a couple of months ago. This is intended to help broadcasters identify the activity they’re engaged in: things like #drawing, #animation, #watercolor, or #robotics. This is unlike anything else on Twitch and we’re excited to see what the community does with it.
Third, we’ve updated our Rules Of Conduct to reflect our official embrace of the Creative community. In short, we encourage you to broadcast your creative process on Twitch, be that visual art, woodworking, costume creation, prop building, music composition, or any other process in which you entertain and connect around a creative activity. We understand that this is vague. We expect to learn much about what is, and is not, appropriate for Twitch as the community grows. See the updated Rules of Conduct for details and our FAQ for further specifics.
And finally, thanks to our friends at Janson Media and BobRoss Inc., we’ll broadcast every episode of the original Bob Ross show, The Joy of Painting, in an epic marathon starting today at 2PM PST on http://www.twitch.tv/bobross. That’s 403 episodes of Bob Ross that will play over the course of 8.5 days. Just for fun, we’re releasing a special Bob Ross Kappa emote too (KappaRoss).
So, go forward, unleash your inner Bob Ross, and get creative.