Bob Ross: The Modern Painting Phenomenon
If you 've ever watched PBS, you likely at some point have heard of Bob Ross. A painter born in Florida, Bob hosted The Joy of Painting, a half-hour show that run from 1983 to 1994, in which he painted a picture and encouraged the audience to paint along with him. It was a simple, but effective idea to get people excited about painting, and it was a very successful show. Sadly, Bob passed away due to a diagnosis of lymphoma in the early 1990s, which forced him to retire. He died at the age of 52 on July 4th, 1995. However, Bob 's legacy has been maintaned throughout the years, and a recent event has just sparked it again. Twitch, an Amazon owned streaming site for video games, recently did something great for Bob Ross ' career that has continued long after his death. To celebrate the launch of a Twitch Creative section of the site, where
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(continuing the legacy with people painting with him) Something to keep in mind, we 're talking about Twitch.TV, a site that until now has been solely about video games, and the demographic that they tend to lean towards. Showing decades old reruns of someone painting shouldn 't have a terribly interesting effect on the site. Yet, even with that, the Bob Ross stream immediately started to create buzz. Twitch made a small Twitter announcement about the project, not expecting much from it, but they recieved an immensely positive reaction. Thousands of viewers began watching, and chat rooms of other big streams started spreading the news about what Twtich was doing. The chat room of the Bob Ross stream was immediately hooked, and very excited to see what Bob would paint on each show. Through most of the weeklong, 24/7 stream, viewer numbers stayed at a constant 100k+, with it often reacting 150k-160k with little to no problem. Twitch reported after the stream that 5.6 million people had in total watched the stream at some point, which was a huge success for not only Twitch, but Bob Ross '