Netflix and Amazon On Demand come to even more

By Tim Conneally | Published January 5, 2009, 11:26 AM

Amazon today announced that owners of the formerly Netflix-exclusive Roku set-top box will be able to access Amazon Video On Demand, and LG announced it's building Netflix instant streaming directly into some of its upcoming HDTVs.

Video rental company Netflix is proving to be a genuine gateway to streaming video content. Today, Amazon announced that its Video On Demand service will be hitting Roku players early this year, adding nearly 40,000 more titles to the around 30,000 Netflix delivers to the diminutive box. Titles are pure H.264 streams (no downloading, since the Roku device has no storage) and will play back at 300, 600, 900, or 1200 kbps. Amazon says movies and TV shows will be rentable or buyable.

LG announced this morning that its upcoming LCD and Plasma HDTVs will be broadband-connected and come with Netflix streaming software built in. LG did not yet announce the names and sizes of these broadband HDTVs, but says it will be displaying them at CES 2009 this week. BetaNews will be live-blogging from LG's keynote at The Venetian in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning.

LG will be competing with Sony and its Bravia Internet Video Link unit, a $299 add-on to Bravia TVs that allows them to access video on demand, as well as Yahoo-supplied regional news content such as news and traffic.

The partnership between South Korean manufacturer LG and Netflix yielded the first Netflix-enabled Blu-Ray player, which recently branched out and will soon receive streams from CinemaNow and YouTube.

Similarly, the first commercially available Netflix streamer, the $99 Roku box, became an open platform in October, welcoming other companies to its SDK, and promising more than just Netflix streams for users in the future.