back to article Forget YouTube – meet ChewTube: Strangers watching millennials eat

Gameplay streaming site Twitch.tv says it will be launching a dedicated channel for live videos of people eating. The Amazon-owned website says its "Social Eating" channel will allow its army of amateur and professional video broadcasters to "socialize with their viewers over their favorite meals". Twitch says you have South …

  1. Baldy50

    Oh my lord!

    Would just make me hungrier than I am right now and that I do not need.

  2. Mark 85
    Facepalm

    After everything going in the world.. there's "social eating"... probably not a new low yet as I'm sure there's something even worse coming along. Can I get a seat on the next Mars trip? I'm not sure I can take Earth anymore.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Holmes

      OTOH, social eating has been standard practice since Olduvai Gorge. It was even featured in "2001: A Space Odyssey".

      there's something even worse coming along

      How about that: NATO General Breedlove (who must be losing sleep about the purity of Ameriyouth's body fluids) was fomenting a war with Russia by biggening up "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine, and the Commander in Chief as well as the hapless Eurodummies lapped it all up.

      Well, it's not being streamed, but it definitely is worse.

    2. Montreal Sean

      I'm thinking of starting a channel as well.

      Mine will be live streaming me sleeping.

      1. Stoneshop
        Go

        Re: I'm thinking of starting a channel as well.

        How about live streaming of you streaming videos?

        1. Montreal Sean

          Re: I'm thinking of starting a channel as well.

          @Stoneshop

          Live streaming of me streaming videos is way too meta, might get mistaken for a hipster. :)

          1. joshimitsu

            Re: I'm thinking of starting a channel as well.

            Live streaming of somebody streaming already exists: where somebody watches a film and their audience watches their reactions. Or they're even reacting to their own videos.

            Then there's gogglebox which has made its way to terrestrial tv...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shirley,

    the Intertubes are overflowing with pride now that their existence appetite for electricity has been justified.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    OK, we saw you eating

    now let's see you poop! This will complete the circle.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: OK, we saw you eating

      And there's more. TurdCam to follow the adventures of "Stinky" as it makes its way through the sewer system. In Brazil, Stinky makes it directly to the sea to find Dory(R), who promptly eats it and then TurdCam becomes DoryGutCam, and then.. a sequel of some sort as Dory(R) gets eaten, and, well, you get it. Butt where does it end? A lone nanocam buried in ever thickening sea sediment for eternity. Now THAT's a long stream. Dibs on the copyright.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: OK, we saw you eating

      Or taking a piss... now THAT'S what I call "streaming" !

      1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        Re: OK, we saw you eating

        Or taking a piss... now THAT'S what I call "streaming" !

        A certain Scotsman has already delivered. Probably NSFW.

    3. Preston Munchensonton
      Coat

      Re: OK, we saw you eating

      Technically, the circle wouldn't be complete until they ate their poop.

      Personally, I'm out at "watch strangers".

  5. Sebastian A

    Is it April 1 already?

    See title.

    1. Doctor_Wibble
      Trollface

      Yes.

      See title.

  6. internetsoldier

    The caption for this article is disrespectful - the internet is irrefutably a human right, and you clearly don't have the capacity to understand it's power.

    1. Stoneshop
      Headmaster

      But still

      it has insufficient power to teach people the correct use of "its" and "it's".

  7. Christian Berger

    And again, that was already done in Germany

    There was a Bavarian TV show in which you would watch an astrophysicist and a philosopher dining. It was filmed from outside a restaurant through the window.

  8. Efros

    Social eating

    I thought there were specialist sites for that already... oh you mean food!

  9. chivo243 Silver badge
    Devil

    Picture this

    Beast Rabban chewing the raw tongue as Baron Harkonnen plays with Beast Rabban's face, that's good eating viewing!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    meh

    If there's an audience. For me starcraft 2, youtubers and streamers are the only interesting things worth watching nowadays. Didn't even watch all that much anime last season.

    I of course had the initial "WTF" moment, then remembered I spent a lot of my years watching "come dine with me" and Masterchef. I mean you can watch scat on the internets so I don't really think anything else is odd.

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      "Come Dine With Me" isn't really about the food at all

      There's a fundamental difference here. These are people being watched eating for its own sake.

      Unless the premise has changed completely since the Loyd Grossman era (#) Masterchef is still essentially a show about food *preparation* with the eating being a means to judge the results.

      "Come Dine with Me" is only about food in the way that a game of football is "about" the ball itself- if not even less so. The food is just a means to an end, a hook on which to hang the voiceover sneering at people's attempts, attitudes and general social interaction, gossip, bitching and backstabbing.

      (#) I really don't watch that much TV nowadays; I've seen articles about the new Masterchef and the presenters, but channel-flicking aside, I've never watched the show itself.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    End of the world

    People have been predicting the end of the world since humans first developed abstract thought.

    Now it's finally arrived. A generation that's so useless, they ain't gonna make it.

    When the mobile phone masts fall into disrepair, some of the more pragmatic millennials will construct cargo-cult replica masts from pizza boxes and micro USB cables. But they won't be able to restore the signal, and in suicidal despair they'll all lay in the road, phone in hand, and wait to be run over by an UBER.

    1. Haku

      Re: End of the world

      So, Mad Max 2+3 meets Idiocracy?

    2. Zimmer
      Coat

      Re: End of the world

      ...and wait to be run over by an UBER.......

      There will be a long wait....you need a mobile App for that....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: End of the world

        Not during surge pricing.

  12. Scaffa
  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why Even Bother to Use the Internet for Anything Remotely Serious Anymore?

    As a dear friend once said, "The world is broken and doesn't want to be fixed."

  14. skies2006

    The next is young attractive woman eating.. while NUDE

    I'll bet you a dollar we will se that as we have seen gamer girls do on Twitch..

  15. wolfetone Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Coming Soon

    Social Deification.

    What goes in must come out as they say, so what better way to socialise with your favourite internet starz than to see them suffer the consequences of that Vindaloo you watched them eat.

    1. Alister

      Re: Coming Soon

      Social Deification - watching each other become Gods?

      I think you need to chastise your spillchucker, as I'm sure you meant defecation.

      1. Chika

        Re: Coming Soon

        As seen on PooTube.

        1. wolfetone Silver badge

          Re: Coming Soon

          "I think you need to chastise your spillchucker, as I'm sure you meant defecation."

          Well this isn't embarrassing at all.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Coming Soon

        For a moment I thought it was a modern fable about how you make the gods wrathful by eating the meat of the sacred cow after exterminating it into the curry (as per Spike Milligan's Dalek) but then I noticed that didn't make much sense either ;)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Coming Soon

      You know not of "Tub girl"?

      Lucky you! My eyes are still burning >_<

      1. wolfetone Silver badge

        Re: Coming Soon

        "You know not of "Tub girl"?

        Lucky you! My eyes are still burning >_<"

        I've seen One Guy One Jar, nothing can shock me.

        *watches Tub Girl*

        MY EYES!!!!!! MY BEAUTIFUL EYES!!!!

  16. PaulR79

    Naturally

    Oh Twitch, you are so wise to unveil a 'social eating' section. It is the only natural decision to reach after not allowing the 'creative' section to eat their food. I suppose you could have just tweaked the rules to allow them eat but no, let's just create another fad to go along with 'bits' and 'cheers'.

    Really, I don't know how much more of this I can take. It's big in Korea? Then go watch it there. Twitch was meant to be a gaming site but now it's almost everything else. If only there was some site that did this..... like JTV. Oh wait..

    Yes, I'm aware a lot of JTV content was movies and series streamed but they could easily offer an alternative to stuffing Twitch full of crap like this.

  17. Black Rat

    What's next, blackhead squeezing?... oh wait

  18. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "I'm a scientist - nothing shocks me."

    Mildly amusing. And not as irrelevant as I thought at first. Eating as a social event, aka eating in groups (or at least not alone) is something our species grew up with over thousands of generations. It's so much more than just consuming food. It's interaction. It's sharing information. It's getting to know each other. It's a good way to introduce new members to a group. It's honing social skills, be it the ability to communicate or simply manners and anything inbetween.

    Think family dinner. Think romantic date. Think workers on their lunch break. Think soldiers sharing rations. Think state banquets. Think parties. Think barbies. Every single one of you reading this just had mental images of people eating together in your head. That's how ingrained it is.

    From cot to coffin, in every culture, the one recurring element in every social gathering is - food.

    And as there are more and more people living alone, while at the same time having access to advanced communications technology - how is it a surprise they are using this technology to fill a need that goes beyond physical nourishment?

    Irrelevant sidenote: The linked article was informative as well. While I already had heard about Tingle and the Hugo thing (brilliant idea, by the way, that's how to tackle bigots), I didn't know that dinosaur erotica was a thing. You learn something new every day!

  19. David Roberts

    What were they thinking?

    A cooking channel where you were not allowed to eat?

    Unlike every TV cookery programme or cookery slot in daytime TV magazine programmes?

    Who are these anal retentive dip shits?

  20. Stoneshop
    WTF?

    Hey, El Reg

    "Yeah actually it's probably time to switch off the internet"

    And in the next article the UN,calls on countries to NOT switch it off. So, it's going to blink, right?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hey, El Reg

      Did you just say the internet was going to blink? I wonder if the geocities domain has lapsed...

  21. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Torn between horror and thankfulness

    "a dedicated channel for live videos of people eating"

    Dear God, that is just the summit of uselessness. It is so abysmally stupid as to drop the collective IQ of Humanity by a full point. I cannot believe we, as a species, can wallow so low.

    On the other hand, thank God we have reached such a height in our global level of well-being that we can waste time in such trivialities instead of having to kill one other to ensure we have enough to eat tomorrow.

    It's the only good side I can think of, though.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Terminator

      Re: Torn between horror and thankfulness

      It's the only a certain type of millennial can meet and have a social meal. Some people seem to walking blindly into The Matrix.

  22. harmjschoonhoven
    Thumb Up

    Social Eating

    reminds me of the film The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté, 1974) by Luis Buñuel which shows what happens when social eating becomes a taboo.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Social Eating

      Gratuitous Henry VIII chicken eating scene ;) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v4tOb9J7W2k

  23. Camilla Smythe

    South Korea... Noodles.

    I believe the operative word is Ramen and yes Ramyeon, South Korean Ramyeon as opposed to the Japanese or Chinese version which is considered to be rubbish, is very popular as a base for a meal. They even have Ramyeon Restaurants. There was however some concern from the Government that Da Yoof who were doing it at home were getting slightly fat because they were adding too much or too much of the wrong stuff to the base so they published some advisory videos and parody arrived. It's quick, simple, infinitely variable and fits within a five minute video.

  24. Eddy Ito

    What's the address of the social emergency room stream where they'll show Darwin Award winners live (sorta?) along with the associated drone video?

    Meh, I've done social eating before, we just call it dining out and we don't need the internet to do it.

  25. A Ghost
    Alert

    You need to check out this gentleman:

    TheReportOfTheWeek

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmEiLvpPNhw

  26. localzuk Silver badge

    Makes a lot of sense

    Creating this category (not channel) allows for people who are spending their time eating on stream to move out of the other categories and not be in the way of people searching for whatever else is there.

    It also allows for some streamers, who are less gamers than community entertainers, to spend a bit more time with their communities, in a purely relaxed and social way.

    Put it this way, having watched Twitch streams since they were still Justin.TV, I can safely say that a lot of eating goes on, especially during longer broadcasts. So, why not let it have its own category? That way, if you don't want to see it, you don't need to go into that category.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Old news as Asia has been doing this for years.... BUT..

    Knowing Twitch they'll insist on using Adobe Flash, so your windows PC will eat it too!

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Per Eric C.

    "well, that's it. I'm going to kill myself. If this is what the world thinks is cool now, then I don't want to be a part of this world anymore."

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    B-Ark, tickets now on sale

    Book early, avoid disappointment.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like