Twitch's Bob Ross Marathon Was a Hit, Weekly Show Now Planned

Twitch recently aired more than 400 episodes of American painter Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting TV show back-to-back as part of a marathon event. Who would watch? A lot of people, it turns out. Twitch has announced that more than 5.6 million people tuned in during the week-long broadcast.

In all, people watched more than 545 million minutes of The Joy of Painting during the marathon, which, at its peak, reached 183,000 concurrent users. Viewers used the KappaRoss emote, created specifically for this event, in the chat some 3.8 million times.

In wake of this tremendous response, Twitch has announced that it will dedicate Monday evenings to the late painter with a weekly show. "Monday night is Bob Ross night," Twitch said in a statement.

Starting tonight, Twitch will run one season of The Joy of Painting--which originally aired on PBS in the '80s and '90s--starting at 3 PM PDT and ending at 9:30 PM PDT. The show had 31 seasons and 403 total episodes, meaning you'll only see repeats once every seven months, Twitch said.

The company added that Janson Media and Bob Ross Inc., the companies that are responsible for the Bob Ross brand, have been "incredibly supportive" of Twitch's Bob Ross streams. As such, they are allowing Twitch streamers to re-broadcast the Monday evening streams and add their own commentary.

In addition, Twitch will celebrate Ross' birthday every year on October 29 (October 29, 2015 would have been his 73rd birthday) by holding marathon events in which all 403 episodes are shown without interruption. On top of that, Twitch has announced that proceeds from the Bob Ross Twitch channel will go to the following groups and organizations (descriptions courtesy of Twitch):

• The rights holders: the wonderful folks who have kept Bob’s work alive all this time
• Root division: our local arts organization supporting artists as well as teaching children the arts
• St Jude: an amazing cancer research organization
• Twitch Creative community support