Amazon adds Discovery Channel and Animal Planet titles to streaming service

Amazon has inked a licensing deal with Discovery Communications that will bring popular Discovery Channel, TLC, and Animal Planet titles to its Prime Instant Video service.

Prime Instant Video is a subset of the company’s video streaming, rental, and download service that allows U.S. subscribers, who pay $79 a year for two-day shipping and other goodies, to stream videos as often they’d like.

Amazon is promising Prime customers all-you-can-stream access to series of popular past shows such as Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, TLC’s Say Yes To The Dress, and Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. Available titles will also include additional Discovery library content and Investigation Discovery, Science, and Military Channel shows and specials.

Amazon has recently added a smattering of television shows and movies from Fox and Viacom to round out its offering and blossom into a full-fledged Netflix competitor. The e-commerce company apparently also has an interest in developing its own original programming.

With the Discovery deal, the Amazon Prime Instant Video library has ballooned to 17,000 titles, the company said. That figure, in theory, makes Amazon’s catalog of titles available for instant streaming larger than Netflix’s, which unofficially offers 13,855 titles, by Instant Watcher’s count. Officially, Netflix doesn’t reveal the size of its catalog.

Photo credit: Discovery Channel