Hundreds of new TV episodes are making their way to Amazon’s Prime Instant Video platform.
The online retail giant has expanded its partnership with NBC Universal, bringing tons of content from NBC TV shows to the burgeoning online platform.
“We are excited to be working with NBCUniversal to add their award-winning lineup of TV shows such as Parks and Recreation and Friday Night Lights to Prime Instant Video. We continue to invest heavily in our content selection for Prime members, and have now reached over 22,000 movies and TV episodes available instantly with unlimited streaming,” said Amazon director of digital video content acquisition Brad Beale in a statement.
Amazon Prime is a $79/year service that started out offering customers unlimited free two-day shipping on most Amazon-inventoried items.
It recently expanded the service so that, at no additional cost, users also receive free streaming video in the same vein as Netflix, as well as access to free Kindle content.
Of course, the problem with Amazon Prime is it has a large up-front cost. $79 to join Amazon Prime is a lot different than less than $10 to join Netflix.
Of course, if you do the math, Prime ends up being cheaper at less than $7/month. And don’t forget, that includes all the other benefits of Amazon Prime too.
The cheaper versions of Amazon Prime, like the $39/year version for students, do not include streaming video access. Nevertheless, this announcement is a big shout from Amazon that it wants to seriously play in the contentious streaming video market. We’ll see what happens.
