Amazon. com Inc. which is the biggest online retailer around the globe has started providing instant streaming of over 5,000 movies as well as TV shows to customers belonging to its Amazon Prime home-delivery service from Tuesday.

This service is a kind of extra to the already existing Amazon Instant Video, which has over 90,000 commercial-free movies as well as TV shows to offer for purchase or rent, as told by the Seattle-based company. A membership to Amazon Prime requires an expenditure of $79 annually to have access to the unlimited free streaming.

The competitors of Amazon in this aspect are Netflix Inc. and Hulu Plus for online subscribers. Besides these, Amazon is also rivaling the age old pay-TV services Comcast Corp. as well as Time Warner Cable Inc.

According to Ralph Schackart, who is an analyst at the William Blair & Co. situated in Chicago, even though Amazon’s initial video library is in no way superior to Netflix’s way ahead digital catalog, they believes that Amazon’s library will go on growing big, particularly taking into consideration its approximately $9 billion in cash. In fact they are expecting further digital video contest to go ahead.