You may know Twitch as that place where people can make millions of dollars by having other people watch them play Minecraft, but the company wants to be more than just a live-streaming platform for video games by expanding into new territory. To be fair, the Amazon-owned company isn’t expanding very far from its core business, as it’s still a platform for live-streaming, but it’s no longer limited to just video game-related streams. Earlier this week, Twitch announced a new section called Twitch Creative, which will broaden the service’s content offerings by focusing on anything related to the arts, be it music or painting. Here, artists will be able to stream themselves practicing their art.
Twitch is best know as the world’s biggest live-streaming platform for video games, a place where casual gamers and high-profile e-sports teams broadcast their action for millions of fans. That fast-growing business caused Amazon to buy Twitch for around $1 billion back in the summer of 2014. But the founders of Twitch were not always focused just on video games. And today they are making a play to capture a whole new genre of live broadcasting: artists at work. Twitch grew out of Justin.TV, a live-streaming platform that was an open platform, like YouTube. Early users broadcast everything from nature footage to high school sports. Eventually gaming emerged as the most popular genre, and the company spun that vertical out into its own site. Now a similar process of mitosis is happening to Twitch. Streamers who mixed artists’ endeavors in with the gaming have found such a strong fan base that now Twitch has decided to help them found their own dedicated website: Twitch Creative. “A couple years ago I started to notice a new type of stream happening,” says Bill Moorier, head of Twitch Creative. “Broadcasters would get tired of gaming and fire up photoshop and start sketching game related art.”