This is the latest collaboration video between a famous Taiwanese top Chef James (who has a youtube channel with over 1.5m subscribers, with regular uploads each exceeding tens to hundreds of thousands of views every couple of days), and the current top Taiwanese pro Hsu Hao-hung
It is a new show in a new experimental format, and the premise is quite simple, Chef James will visit different professions and learn from them, while they learn from Chef James. Hence, the quite hilarious scene where Chef James had to take Go classes together with kindergarten kids.
What are your thoughts on this type of cross-disciplinary co-op? Do you think top chef vs top pro, or reality TV format shows can help promote Go content?
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I think it’s interesting and funny. This episode will probably not have a huge impact but any serious attention to the game is a good thing
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I think to have a big impact we need to have really famous people like Mr Beast, iShowSpeed or BTS do something related to Go.
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This sort of been done before in Taiwan, with a much larger channel here with Chih-Yuan Tai (actor, comedian, TV host, all-around entertainer, I believe everyone in Taiwan knows about him or watched programs he hosted growing up) and HJJ. It was more than 5 years ago. The episode alone has more than 3 million views. (with Go population likely only in hundreds of thousands in Taiwan, and a population of 23 million, almost anyone vaguely interested in Go in Taiwan watched this). It was just a fun 1-hour-long episode, sort of dramatising Hikaru no Go if it were set in Taiwan.
And I believe it pushed the rapid rise of HJJ channel beyond the traditional Go community in Taiwan and expanded the brand recognition of HJJ schools. The language barrier in East Asia, with each of them having its own cultural ecosystem, makes it very hard to push or have a network effect beyond their cultural borders (let alone the largest one in China, is almost a closed ecosystem for their own media entertainment and platforms).
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