UPDATED 13:10 EDT / AUGUST 09 2016

NEWS

Twitch to start streaming Amazon TV pilots, including ‘The Tick’

Twitch has been the go-to livestreaming platform for gamers for several years now, but ever since it was acquired by Amazon for an astonishing $970 million in 2014, the site has been slowly expanding its scope outside of video games. Now it looks like Twitch may be getting ready for a major change, as Amazon has announced that it will begin streaming the pilot episodes of several of its new TV shows on Twitch.

Amazon made the announcement over the weekend at the Television Critics Association’s conference in Los Angeles (via Polygon). According to Amazon, Twitch will stream the pilot episodes of three new series, including its reboot of the cult classic comic series, The Tick.

This move offers some clear benefits to Amazon, since it effectively turns the Twitch user base into one giant focus group. By monitoring the chat, Amazon can gauge reactions to the shows as they air, something that ratings groups like The Nielsen Company would love to be able to do. Of course, Twitch does not exactly have the most diverse user base, being composed mostly of young male video game nerds, but that is also likely the perfect demographic for a show like The Tick, Amazon seems to know what it is doing.

This would not be the first time Twitch has offered streams for pre-recorded TV shows. When it unveiled its new Creative category last year, Twitch began airing episodes of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, and when the site later introduced a cooking tag, it also began showing episodes of Julia Child’s The French ChefThe Joy of Painting in particular struck a chord with Twitch users, quickly becoming the most popular channel in the Creative category.

Twitch offers an entirely new type of TV viewing experience thanks to its chat rooms, which allow users to chat with one another about a show while watching it in real time. Essentially, it is like sitting on the couch and watching TV with your friends, except in this case your friends are tens of thousands of Twitch users. With The Joy of Painting, this led to a number of ongoing memes, such as users repeating “RIP, devil” every time Bob Ross cleans his brush by “beating the devil out of it.”

Amazon’s new pilots will become available on Amazon Prime on August 19, and the shows will air on Twitch for a 24-hour period on August 31.

Image courtesy of Amazon Studios

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