Cal's new Twitch studio gives every varsity athlete cameras, a gaming lounge and ten weekly hours of shows, with four more schools lined up.
UC Berkeley has opened a professional Twitch studio for its athletes, the first campus studio from StreamU, a college sports streaming network that NIL company TheLinkU built with Twitch. Athletes from every Cal sport can use it, and about 10 hours of shows are planned each week.
The room has multi-camera gear, studio lights, a PlayStation 5 lounge and a portable camera kit for streaming around campus. Shows include workouts, gaming, cooking contests, campus tours and game-day coverage.
For fans, it means more of their team on Twitch between games, and a new way to get to know players before they become household names.
College athletes already juggle practice, classes and travel. At UC Berkeley, they now have a fourth commitment on offer: a professional Twitch studio of their own. Cal opened the space in mid-October, and its athletes have already filled about 10 hours of live shows every week.
It matters beyond Berkeley because it shows where college sports money is heading. Since athletes were allowed to earn from their name, image and likeness (NIL) in 2021, a big online following has become worth real money. A campus Twitch studio turns streaming from a hobby into part of the athletic program, and if it works, your favorite team could be the next to build one.
The Cal Twitch studio is the first campus facility from StreamU, a livestreaming network for college athletics that NIL company TheLinkU launched with Twitch in March 2026. Every Cal varsity athlete, in any sport, can use it to go live on the school’s StreamU channel.
The room is built to feel like a small TV set. UnlimitedIRL, StreamU’s technology partner, fitted it with Canon and Sony cameras, studio lighting and audio, and a Blackmagic Design switcher, the device a producer uses to cut between cameras during a live show. It is decorated in Cal branding.
Two extras stand out. A PlayStation 5 lounge handles gaming streams, and a portable kit pairs a Sony FX3 camera with a LiveU encoder (a box that sends live video over cellular networks), so athletes can take a stream out onto campus instead of staying in one room.
Most of the schedule is not the game itself. It is the stuff fans rarely see. The weekly lineup covers:
All of it lands on one channel, so fans don’t have to track down dozens of individual players. StreamU’s chief revenue officer, Landon Goesling, has bigger ideas too. He has said he would like rival players to stream against each other in the run-up to big games, a Cal receiver gaming against a UCLA player, for example, with both fan bases watching.
He also pointed to a practical reason: college rosters change every year. Regular streams give fans a quick way to get to know new faces before they ever step on the field.
StreamU works as a network of school-branded Twitch channels under one umbrella. Schools and athletes can earn through Twitch subscriptions, advertising, shared sponsorships and the platform’s built-in tools for fan payments. TheLinkU, founded in 2022 by Austin Elrod, runs the business side: contracts, payouts and reporting.
That back office matters. NIL deals can get complicated, and most students don’t have an agent or accountant. Having a company handle the paperwork removes one reason not to try. It also helps schools stay within NIL rules, which StreamU says was part of the plan from day one, with TheLinkU acting as the network’s compliance backbone.
The model also reaches beyond football and basketball stars. StreamU pitched itself from the start as a way for athletes in Olympic and smaller sports, who rarely get TV time, to build an audience and earn too.
Ron Rivera, the former NFL head coach who is now Cal’s athletic director and football general manager, called helping athletes grow their NIL potential a big priority for the department. UnlimitedIRL’s operations chief, Taylor Webb, said the technical side should never be what stops an athlete from streaming.
If you follow college sports, expect more of your team on Twitch outside game time: hangouts, gaming nights and behind-the-scenes looks on match days. Most of it is free to watch, with optional paid subscriptions if you want to support a player.
For athletes, streaming is now a real career path. Diego Pavia, the Vanderbilt quarterback who won several national awards in 2025, went undrafted by the NFL and is building a career as a Twitch streamer. A recruit thinking about life after sports might well notice a school that teaches those skills.
There is a catch worth watching. Molly Harry, a sport management professor at the University of Florida, has asked when an opportunity like this turns into an unspoken expectation. If streaming becomes something every athlete feels they must do, it adds pressure to an already packed week.
Cal isn’t the first school to train athletes on camera. Clemson opened a branding institute with photo and video studios in 2023, and LSU runs content days for its athletes. Cal is the first to turn that into a regular live Twitch operation with a fixed weekly schedule.
StreamU says four more campus studios are coming: the University of Arkansas, Texas A&M, Baylor and the University of Houston. They were due to open in the weeks after Cal’s launch, all built on the same design. Arkansas already has a head start: late last year it signed up with TheLinkU for its NIL program, which connects Razorback athletes with more than 30 national brands. If you follow any of those teams, check for their StreamU channel on Twitch.
On Cal’s StreamU channel on Twitch, which carries all the studio’s weekly shows in one place.
StreamU is a college sports livestreaming network that NIL company TheLinkU launched with Twitch, giving each school its own branded channel and ways to earn money.
Yes. Athletes from every varsity sport at Cal can go live from it, not just football and basketball players.
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