"It's a gateway to Twitch": Domingo relaunches Popcorn, the platform's successful talk show on Tuesday

The comedian and actor Alain Chabat, the astronaut Thomas Pesquet, the singer Clara Luciani, the sportsman Ciryl Gane and even the Caesarized actor Pierre Niney. For four years, personalities popular with the general public have appeared on the “Popcorn” set. This French talk show produced by Webedia Livestream is broadcast every Tuesday at 8 p.m. on the live video platform Twitch. This Tuesday evening, for the launch of the fifth season, the public will find the usual formula: a host, three columnists and the guest of the week, who this time will be the comedian Panayotis Pascot. The very popular show attracts nearly 300,000 spectators on average and has several million views on all platforms where it is rebroadcast such as YouTube or Spotify in podcast format.

Behind this success is Pierre-Alexis Bizot, alias Domingo on social networks. Going from an avid streamer of the League of Legends video game to a seasoned animator, he has established himself as a flagship entrepreneur on TwitchTV. In addition to the idea of ​​​​his "Popcorn" show created in 2019, Domingo has gradually made himself the ambassador of sport on the platform. Cycling, tennis, basketball... it regularly offers live events dedicated to different disciplines. Like “L’Échappée”, a virtual cycling competition, which brought together nearly 200,000 live spectators during its first broadcast in 2021.

LE FIGARO. - Your show “Popcorn” is officially the most watched talk show on Twitch. In four seasons, you have gone from 20,000 Internet users connected live at the time of the broadcast to more than 300,000 today. How do you explain this long-term success?

Pierre-Alexis BIZOT. - It happened gradually. Our goal was to be able to offer a program that would appeal to the generation of 18-35 year olds, to talk about social issues and the internet. We didn't necessarily want to design a program opposed to television but rather adapted to the codes of the new generation: with great freedom of time, since "Popcorn" can last between 1h55 and 2h40. This then makes it possible to segment the program and rebroadcast it in a podcast format. Thus, everyone can consume "Popcorn" as they wish.

Then, the key idea of ​​the show is to make people have a good time, through discussions between the columnists and the guests. For this, we have formats like “the challenger of the week”, where a person comes to tell us about his passion or his job. For example, for the last episode of last season, we had both a cinema noisemaker as a challenger and, as a guest, actor Alain Chabat. This gives rise to friendly and unusual interactions. I sincerely believe that it is these ingredients together that have allowed the success of the show in the long term.

You manage to capture a very young audience, which television sometimes struggles to attract. Is it also a goal to get older people to watch "Popcorn", like the parents or even grandparents of your audience?

Since the start, the show "Popcorn" has been a gateway to Twitch, that's what we want. At the moment, the majority of our audience are men between the ages of 18 and 25. But, little by little, we find that this audience is widening, with parents watching the show with their teenagers and discovering that "Popcorn" is not so far from television codes.

Especially since we seek to be accessible. So, tonight as a columnist, we have the streamer Jiraiya, whose daughter entered CP. He will surely tell us a little about this particular start of the school year, which may echo the experience of other families.

When we also receive guests from the general public, like Alain Chabat, who know less about Twitch, we take the time to explain to them the essence of the platform and its codes. This allows at the same time to accompany neophyte spectators. These are the moments that naturally broaden the audience.

On “Popcorn”, you invite famous personalities and, in addition to the interview, you invite them to stay throughout the show, to participate in the board games. Is this a way of recreating, in a way, a French “late show”?

Let's say that in France, we can't completely do a late-show like in the United States, where the host invites only one known person and accompanies the interview with sketches. Rather, we rely on creating a set that works well where different personalities, who do not come from the same worlds, are in symbiosis. For this new season, moreover, we have not fixed three titular columnists but formed a pool of about fifteen people, to change the sets. With this idea of ​​recreating a unique program every Tuesday.

Speaking of guests, which personalities would you like to see come on set for this fifth season?

I would very much like to receive Jonathan Cohen, the actor François Civil or the singer Angèle. But it's not that simple, because you have to make these guests understand that the codes of "Popcorn" are not the same as on television and that we don't have a segment of the show dedicated to their promotion. The goal is really that they stay participate, more broadly, in “Popcorn”. Generally, though, they love the experience. Alain Chabat, for example, really liked this very free atmosphere on set.

In recent seasons, you have also received lesser-known people to decipher parts of the news. The purpose is to reinforce these passages?

We don't want to editorialize everything and we want to keep the tone we have, without taking ourselves too seriously. I am interested in lots of things, so I am very happy to welcome people who are leaders in their field and to decipher themes that we do not know. We have received Hugo Lisoir, who studies space, or scientist Aurélie Jean several times to talk to us about artificial intelligence.

Nevertheless, we do not wish to go further by receiving political personalities to make them react to these topical issues. We don't want to do a format like the one Hugo Décrypte proposed yesterday, when interviewing President Emmanuel Macron on his channel.

What else is planned?

We have been working on a new set, which will be unveiled tonight live. And on some format changes like new games between guests and columnists. Some highlights of the show resume like “the rewind of Twitch”, which consists of a set of extracts, of a few minutes, on all that happened of unusual on the platform during the week.

We also want to keep the interaction with the chat, the live discussion thread that we have on Twitch. But the more Internet users we have who join us, the less easy it is. So we worked on a new way to receive viewer feedback simultaneously and take it into consideration during the show. You will discover all this at 8 p.m.!

You organize many sports-oriented events, in which you also participate. Squeezie does the same, creating the GP Explorer, the first edition of which brought together more than 40,000 spectators in the stands of the Bugatti Le Mans circuit last year and a million people live on Twitch... This is the personification of these events that makes them popular with young people?

It works, that's for sure. For us streamers, this allows us to acquire legitimacy in a sporting event where we are not necessarily expected by our audience and to go all the way. Inevitably, if Squeezie had not participated in the GP Explorer, it would have frustrated him and perhaps would have less enthused his public, who are following him in this challenge. This aspect of personification of the event makes us specific and interesting for young people, who see something more authentic in it, while having a form of "entertainment" à la Netflix.

Regarding cycling, for example, it is true that an event like the Tour de France is now struggling to capture an audience under 25 years old. By offering L'Échappée, a virtual cycling competition where fellow streamers compete, I offer another way to consume this sport and share this passion. Finally, the public accompanies us in these ever crazier projects and they have the impression of participating a little in our personal trajectories.