Amazon Instant Video Comes to Xbox 360

Amazon just announced that its Instant Video service is now available on Microsoft’s Xbox 360. With the Amazon Instant Video app for Xbox Live Gold subscribers, Xbox users can now access the roughly 120,000 movies and TV episodes available for renting and purchasing on Amazon’s streaming video service. The app also offers access to the more limited Prime Instant video selection, Amazon’s video service for its $79/year Prime members.

The Instant Video app also supports Amazon’s Whispersync syncing service. This allows Amazon’s users to start watching videos on their TVs and then finish watching them on their Kindle Fires, for example. The app obviously also gives users access to their previously bought videos, as well as their watchlists.

Kinect owners will be happy to hear that they can use both voice commands and gestures to control the app.

Over 32 million U.S. households now access online video on their TVs. Video game consoles, as a recent Forrester study pointed out, are currently the most popular way to stream Internet video to TVs and Amazon has been relatively slow in capitalizing on this trend.

With this release, Amazon Instant is now available on virtually all of the popular set-top boxes and consoles (with the exception of the Wii). Just last month, Amazon launched its PS3 app and today’s release for the Xbox now brings Instant Video to the most popular console for video streaming in the U.S.