Amazon has just announced a deal with CBS to allow Amazon Prime customers to stream television shows from CBS’s library of content. Financial terms of the non-exclusive deal were not disclosed.
According to the release, Amazon Prime customers will be able to instantly watch thousands of episodes from the CBS library at no additional cost to their membership. In February, Amazon officially launched the instant streaming service for movies and TV shows for Prime subscribers.
Additionally, CBS content will be added to Amazon Instant Video is a streaming video service that offers customers more than 90,000 movies and television shows available to purchase or rent. With the deal, Amazon will add 2,000 episodes to the content that Prime members can access, which now totals 8,000 movies and television shows. The CBS deal includes full seasons for 18 television series, including “The Tudors,” “Numb3rs,” “Medium,” the complete “Star Trek” franchise, “Frasier” and “Cheers.”
The deal is interesting because it’s one of the first formal media partnerships for Amazon in content streaming. Competitor Netflix has dominated the space because of its licensing deals for massive amounts of content. But similar to Netflix, Amazon’s content appears to be older content as opposed to new-releases, a market which Apple has been able to corner.