Amazon this morning announced that it has reached a content distribution agreement with Discovery Communications that will allow Amazon Prime members to instantly stream prior seasons of series from Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Science and more from the company’s 25-year programming library.
Among the new programs included in the agreement with Discovery are Dirty Jobs and Animal Planet’s Whale Wars, in addition to a bunch of other titles.
The new content will be made available on Prime Instant Video, a digital video streaming and download subscription service from Amazon Instant Video (formerly known as ‘Unbox’) that launched in 2011 and aims to rival Netflix in the US.
The Prime service costs $79 a year and offers other benefits, such as two-day shipping for items bought on Amazon.com.
Since the debut of Prime Instant Video in February 2011, Amazon says it been able to grow its instant streaming catalog to 17,000 titles today (up from 15,000 last month), in addition to the more than 120,000 titles that are offered to all customers for purchase or rent on Amazon Instant Video.
The company had already managed to strike content licensing deals with Viacom, Disney-ABC Television Group, PBS and News Corp.
However, a recent Bloomberg report suggested that Amazon hasn’t convinced a lot of people to become Prime members so far.
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