Amazon Strikes Streaming Deal With Universal

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New development in the streaming sector, folks, as the crew out at Amazon have just announced details of a new deal to bring a surprisingly potent player in the movie world onto their streaming roster. That’s right, the folks out at Universal have just inked a deal that will give the up and coming competitor to Netflix’s streaming service a little extra punch.

Coming hot on the heels of a comparable agreement with CBS, Universal has agreed to land a bunch of different movies on the streaming service. That brings Amazon Prime’s count of streaming videos and TV shows up to just around 9,000, which looks good until you compare it to Netflix, which is currently packing around 17,000. Neither is really a bellwether, though, when you consider that Netflix’s DVD library is, at last count, somewhere in the six figure range. However, it’s worth noting that the more a la carte selections of Amazon Instant Video, at last report, currently approach Netflix’s DVD numbers at 90,000.

This may be the start of something interesting: a real sea change in the streaming video marketplace. Clearly, Netflix is on top, but it’s burned a lot of its goodwill with outages and price hikes with minimal explanation. Naturally, the more streaming titles Netflix gains, the more of that goodwill it will recover, especially if the various competitors in the field don’t manage to keep up with their own numbers accordingly.

Whether or not this means Netflix is on the way out and Amazon or a similar competitor on the way in remains to be seen, but one thing is perfectly clear: customers are looking for value now more than ever in recent memory, and those that don’t provide value accordingly will find themselves on the bad end of a serious shortage of customers.

So what do you guys think? Are we seeing the start of a shakeup in the industry, and the ascension of Amazon as a streaming provider? Or is this just a minor tremor from which Netflix will easily escape to retain its current rank as top of the heap? Either way, we want to hear from you, so head down to the comments section and tell us what all this means to you.