This week, the New York Times featured an article about how the entertainment industry is attempting to tap into to the art world. Plenty of networks have tried (“Gallery Girls” on Bravo, “Street Art Throwdown” on Oxygen), but streaming networks are also tossing their hats in the ring. Debuting on Crackle, “The Art of More,” will star Dennis Quaid and Kate Bosworth and chronicles the “cutthroat and glamorous world of premium auction houses.” On the other end of the spectrum, the live-streaming platform Twitch has just launched a vertical in collaboration with Adobe to offer live videos of artists painting, photoshopping, you name it.
Twitch is traditionally a platform that allows video-gamers to watch each other play in real time as well as chat. This exact same formula has been applied to artists, with subscribers searching for categories by hashtag (#drawings, #painting #sculpting, etc). One would assume that the primary function of this platform would be for educational purposes…which the benefits are obvious (pay for a class to learn that photoshop technique vs. streaming a video on Twitch).
The vertical just launched and thus far has seen it’s greatest success in it’s streaming of Bob Ross’s 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting (almost 70,000 viewers). But when that novelty wears off, what will subscribers be left with? A little exploring led me to videos of guys smoking vape pens and designing stickers, to young girls quietly illustrating on tablets. Intriguingly, there was quite a bit of engagement on the chat option for each video, with people asking about the art to more broad questions like the meaning of life.
How this platform progresses will be very interesting, especially since Amazon felt it valuable enough to purchase for $1 billion last year. Would you pay a few bucks a month to watch people creating in their studios?
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