Amazon Kindles Up PBS Shows [Multichannel News]
Amazon has reached a deal for its Prime Instant Video service to carry over 1,000 episodes of PBS programs. The deal will bring such public television programs as NOVA, Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, and The French Chef. The deal will also bring the various Ken Burns documentaries that have aired on PBS.
The deal will give Amazon's video service roughly 12,000 total video titles by the end of the year. That would be twice as many titles as Amazon Prime had when it launched back in February 2011. It has deals with Twentieth Century Fox, CBS, NBCU, Sony and Warner Bros., among many others, making it the strongest current competitor to Netflix. Estimates by research firm Piper Jaffray estimates that Amazon Prime has about 5 million Prime members out of the total 121 million Amazon customers.
In the battle between the various online video services, the best ammunition is content, and the more deals like this that these companies can iron out the better they will fare against the mounting competition.
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