Amazon Prime subscribers will soon be able to stream full seasons of TV shows like The Tudors, Numb3rs, Medium, Cheers and Frasier, thanks to a licensing agreement with and Amazon announced today. The entire Star Trek franchise is also part of the deal, which adds a total of 2,000 episodes from 18 shows to the Prime library. There’s no word on how much Amazon spent for these rights.
Amazon launched its Prime Instant Video service in February, offering subscribers who pay a yearly flat fee for two-day shipping of physical goods access to the Prime video library at no extra cost. The service launched with a library of 5,000 titles, many of which were also available on Netflix and Hulu. With the CBS content, this number will now grow to over 8,000, according to Amazon.
The new deal adds some fare to the library that isn’t available on Hulu, even for paying customers, since CBS doesn’t license its content to the site. At least some of the shows mentioned in Amazon’s release today are also available for streaming on Netflix. But with a controversial price increase announced last week, Amazon may be able to cash in on discontent amongst Amazon’s customers and get more people to subscribe to Prime.
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