After a faltering start in online video Amazon moved to follow Netflix's lead by building out an online entertainment subscription from an existing subscription service. The CBS and NBC Universal deals bolster Amazon's content library as it continues to develop Amazon Prime as a content subscription service. This expansion in catalogue is a necessary step if Amazon is going to avoid looking like an also ran in the online SVOD market. However, Amazon Prime Video currently has a streaming library of 9,000 titles which remains less than a third of Netflix's streaming library of 30,000.

Hollywood studios are seeing the start of an unprecedented level of competition in the subscription TV licensing business, with Amazon joining a market of buyers that not only includes next-generation networks such as Netflix and Hulu, but also premium TV platforms such as Starz and HBO similarly seeking to take movie rights across both traditional pay-TV and online. Long term, this is going to be a unique area of new media revenue growth for studios, as buyers such as Apple and Google also enter the market for subscription rights. Netflix alone is expected to spend close to $1bn in non-exclusive online SVOD rights in 2011, as what used to be exclusive pay-TV and linear licensing windows are increasingly fragmenting into a non-exclusive multiplatform licensing business.