Twitch pairs gaming with food in 4-day Julia Child marathon

Masterful chefs and talented game streamers: They don’t seem like an obvious pair, but they’ll find a home together on live streaming platform Twitch.

As part of its expansion of Twitch Creative, a section of the site that allows users to stream content related to a variety of hobbies, Twitch launched its own Food channel Tuesday. To celebrate that launch, fans will get a marathon of all 203 episodes Julia Child’s The French Chef, beginning at 5 p.m. ET Tuesday and running through Friday.

This marathon mimics Twitch’s Bob Ross marathon last November, when the service ran a week and a half of The Joy of Painting to launch the Twitch Creative brand. Those episodes spanned Ross’s career, from 1983 to 1994.

The Bob Ross marathon was a huge success for a brand previously known entirely for gaming. It boasted 183,000 concurrent viewers at its peak, and a total of 5.6 million viewers -- as well as 3.8 million uses of a specially-made Bob Ross emote during the Twitch chat.

Twitch has responded to the surprising demand for Ross by broadcasting a season of Ross’s show every Monday on its flagship creative channel. That rebroadcast gets 5,000 to 6,000 concurrent viewers every week -- making it as big as some popular game streams, said Bill Moorier, head of Twitch Creative.

"I knew it would be popular, but the level of passion and interaction around it, I don’t think anyone could have predicted it,” said Moorier. "He really has staying power -- and Julia does for cooking what he does for art."

Twitch’s food channel, which is simply Twitch.tv/food, will feature other food programming down the line, Moorier said, including full-time cooking streamers who have turned their channels into successes on the gaming platform, like DomesticDan and CookingforNoobs.