HBO and Amazon team up to give Prime members access to classic content

HBO moves a bundle of classic content to Amazon Instant, preps HBO Go for Fire TV

hbo amazon strike deal for classic shows prime instant 3 — Scene from HBO's The Wire Image used with permission by copyright holder

[Update: This story was updated May 21, 2014 to include the first arrival of a series of HBO content bundles bound for Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service.]

Roughly this time last month, Amazon and HBO revealed they had struck a deal to give Prime Instant Video subscribers free access to some of the premium network’s original films and definitively classic series, including old favorites like The Sopranos and The Wire. Today Amazon announced the first addition of that HBO content to its streaming service.

The following titles are now available to Prime members for unlimited streaming:

All seasons of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, and Six Feet Under, and more recent favorites Eastbound & Down, Enlightened and Flight of the Conchords
Select seasons of current series such as True Blood, Boardwalk Empire and Treme
Select miniseries, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams, Parade’s End and Angels in America
Original movies like Mary and Martha, Temple Grandin and You Don’t Know Jack
Comedy specials from Louis CK, Ellen DeGeneres, Lewis Black and Bill Maher
Documentaries including When the Levees Broke, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and the Autopsy and Iceman series

Both new and previous seasons of some of HBO’s most popular current titles such as Girls, The Newsroom, and Veep will also become available over the course of the multi-year agreement, with release of the older episodes slated for roughly three years after their original airdates.

As part of the deal, HBO GO will also become available as an app on Amazon’s recently released streaming set-top box, the Fire TV, by the end of 2014.

Less than three months ago, HBO revealed that it was prepared to move to a purely broadband-delivered distribution model at any time. The new deal, which marks the first time HBO programming has been licensed to an online-only subscription streaming service, allows HBO to test the online streaming waters without committing to a standalone service.

While the latest episodes of newer series and uber-popular titles such as Game of Thrones are still out of reach for Amazon Instant Video viewers, today’s deal marks a major move for HBO’s notoriously guarded vault of sought-after content.

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