Live-streaming video service Twitch is making its latest attempt to compete with traditional television – by launching its own food channel.
The Amazon-owned site is starting with a famous name, though one perhaps not known to its Gen Y and Gen Z audience.
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.
At the time of writing, the stream of Child’s show had been watched more than 550k 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.
The company ended 2015 with more than 1.7 million broadcasters, averaging 550,000 simultaneous viewers – with the average Twitch viewer watching for 421.6 minutes a month.
Amazon paid nearly $1bn to buy Twitch in 2014, reportedly gazumping YouTube owner Google in the process.
