Amazon Prime Xbox app

Amazon will now offer its streaming Instant Video service to Xbox 360 owners via a brand new app that was released today.

The move will make all streaming purchases, rentals, and free Prime videos available through the popular gaming console. It also means the Playstation 3 is no longer the sole game console to feature Amazon’s streaming video offerings.

An Amazon Xbox Live app makes perfect sense for the company. Not only has media usage on the Xbox risen above the console’s main purpose of gaming, but it’s also part of Microsoft’s overall strategy to break into the digital media market. Several other music and video streaming services are already available on the console, such as Comcast’s Xfinity TV, HBO Go, Last.fm, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and many others.

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The bottom line is that any company with a streaming video service should be available on the Xbox.

Amazon is passing on its standard promotion to all Xbox owners that aren’t already Amazon Prime Members. The company is giving one month of the service for free, which entitles you to a fair amount of free streaming movies and free shipping on lots of products sold through Amazon.

Now if Amazon would only wise up and start building in some decent user-friendly controls to navigate through that 17,000+ title library of streaming videos and episodes, we’d all be in good shape.

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