After the success of the charming and emotional Bob Ross marathon on Twitch, the company is expanding the range of its creative streaming with a new marathon. This time around, the topic is cooking—the new Food channel will be broadcasting all 201 episodes of Julia Child's The French Chef. The stream starts today at 5pm EDT and should last around four days.

Twitch started out in 2011 as a video game-oriented offshoot of the Justin.tv lifecasting platform. In August 2014, the original Justin.tv site was closed down so that the company could focus exclusively on Twitch. A few days after this change, Amazon announced that it was buying the company for $970 million

The Bob Ross and Julia Child streams both represent an attempt to broaden Twitch's appeal in two ways at once. The focus on creativity rather than gaming is one element. While there's a certain amount of crossover—streamers have cast things like making cosplay costumes and creating game-related artwork—as Bob Ross demonstrated, the appeal is broader. Adding cooking into the mix takes things even further from the core gaming audience.

The other notable aspect is that both of these shows are pre-recorded. Very pre-recorded—The French Chef was produced between 1963 and 1973, and Julia Child died in 2004. Traditionally, a large part of the Twitch experience was the ability to interact (via Twitch chat) with the streamer. That's obviously not possible here, but as we discovered with Bob Ross, this may not matter. The collaborative viewing experience was enough to prove compelling on its own. The viewers of the Bob Ross stream talked among themselves, sharing in their enjoyment of the therapeutic calm of Ross' manner, and the series of memetic responses that developed during the stream took on an almost religious nature.

To foster this same response, the new food channel does of course come with its own emoticons, two of which are free, the remainder of which require a $4.99/month subscription to the channel. After the marathon concludes, the plan is to use it to show more pre-recorded shows, though Twitch has not said which chefs or shows will be shown.

Certain incongruities that were apparent during the Bob Ross stream still look as if they will continue to be a feature of the Julia Child one. In particular, Twitch's advertising is heavily skewed toward the gamer demographic, featuring lots of loud noises, fast cuts, memes, and obnoxiousness. While these ads are a natural fit for gaming streams, their tone makes them altogether more peculiar when run alongside the creative content. If Twitch wants to continue to expand its work in this area, it would do well to offer more diverse advertising.