Amazon has long had a very popular deal with its Prime feature. Originally, it started as a way to get free shipping on purchases that you could make to the online store. But since then, the company has tacked on a lot of additional services, all for the same yearly fee. One such service is the ability to stream videos including TV shows and movies, for free, included in your Amazon Prime subscription. This used to be available on computers as well as some streaming devices like the Roku box. And now the company has just revealed on its Web page that the service is now available on the Sony PlayStation as well.

If you're familiar with Prime, you know that they have a fairly large catalog of TV shows and movies. Right now, it's already a real competitor to huge companies like Netflix and Hulu (News - Alert), but one of the disadvantages of Prime is that it used to be only available on a limited selection of devices. For example, you can watch Prime on your Xbox 360 already, but it's not available natively. Setting this up requires connecting your Xbox to a PC, and downloading some software. Instead, Netflix and Hulu have enjoyed a larger footprint in the average home. But Amazon isn't staying still, and it's clear that the company wants to become a major player. With this latest announcement, they now have a presence on one of the three consoles, and it would be surprising if the others didn't follow soon after. Already the company has been making deals with a lot of content providers.

There's no hint yet as to when Prime Instant Video will appear on other consoles, but if you own a PS3 you can now rent or stream videos. The company’s collection of over 17,000 titles are ready to be accessed, and all you need to do is register your PlayStation to start watching. This is good news for gamers, or anyone who owns the console, although it may not be such great news for competitors like Netflix. So Amazon is clearly hoping to add more viewers to its customer base thanks to this initiative, and is poised to get noticed more now that its Prime service will be visible directly on the PS3 dashboard. While the brand is well known for its books and other online goods, the instant streaming service has so far been restricted to the U.S. and isn't that well known among customers.

Like other providers Netflix, Hulu and so on, Amazon is clearly trying to get on as many devices as possible, and it's no surprise that they have now reached the console market. If things keep going the same way, we can expect Prime Instant Streaming to appear on other devices in the near future.