Good news for Amazon Prime members: Amazon.com has signed a deal with Viacom that gives its Amazon Prime Instant Video service access to a lot more stuff–from Jersey Shore to Dora the Explorer. It now offers more than 15,000 streaming videos to Prime members at no additional charge.

Netflix seems to be shy about disclosing the number of streaming videos it has–its FAQ just says “thousands”–but Roku’s site says it’s “over 20,000″ and I’ve also seen a figure of 25,000 quoted. In either case, Amazon Prime, which started out a year ago with just 5,000 titles, appears to be closing in.

But Amazon still isn’t quite marketing it as a Netflix archival. The video streaming is a freebie for those of us who pay $79 for discounted shipping of physical products, not a standalone service with a standalone price tag. That lets it float under the radar and makes it sound like a bountiful bonus rather than a skimpy selection.

My guess is that at some point, Amazon will start treating Prime Instant Video like it wants to take on Netflix in a seriously manner. That’ll presumably involve offering it at a similar (or lower?) monthly price.

The logical time to do so is when the catalogs have roughly the same quantity of movies and TV shows. I wonder if it’ll happen by the end of this year?

By itself, Netflix exceeds traffic for P2P file sharing, Web browsing, and real-time communications. By specific source, it far outpaces BitTorrent (at 11 percent) and YouTube (10 percent). Guess Comcast was throttling the wrong technology, eh?

Put that in perspective — that means one out of every four packets headed to an Internet user’s computer is delivering Netflix content, a pretty stunning ratio. It also is the biggest contributor to all real-time entertainment traffic, which is about half of all downstream data being delivered.

Could Netflix be ready to become the iTunes of streaming? I think so–and it may be all the more reason why Apple may want to throw its own hat into the ring.

With ISPs moving lately towards bandwidth caps, I wonder how much longer this growth in traffic from Netflix will be allowed to last. Executives were up in arms a few years back about how BitTorrent was clogging their pipes, but now it seems as if legal content is what’s now the biggest threat to bandwidth. Ain’t that ironic?

About 1,400 titles are available through the app, according to recent reports. That may even get better, if I’m reading into the narration of the teaser, which says:

“Get every episode of every season of your favorite HBO shows, plus hit movies and much more — all free to HBO subscribers and all streaming on your iPad, laptop or smartphone wherever you are. HBO Go — it’s HBO, anywhere.”

The date May 2 is teased, which seems to indicate that’s when these apps would be released for both iOS and Android devices that are featured in the video. I haven’t seen any official statements from the network just yet, so this is pretty much all we have to go with.

GigaOm does have a response from a TimeWarner spokesperson (parent company of HBO) which confirmed May 2 as the release date although with the caveat that all platforms and devices may not be supported right away.

Now don’t dump UStream just yet: “certain YouTube partners” are the first to gain access. YouTube says that the service will gradually be opened up to more and more partners, although it did not specifically say whether or not consumers would be able to use the live streaming. I’d venture to guess this is in the works, but obviously YouTube will need to make sure their servers would be able to handle the obvious extra load above their traditional video business.

Al Jazeera English has already been using this technology for at least two months now, helping that channel further reach US audiences that so far are still shut out by cable companies from being able to watch it on their televisions.

If you’re interested in checking out some live video on the site, head over to this page on the company’s website. Nothing too interesting so far– let’s hope that the company attracts some more high-profile content providers.

Time Warner’s most vocal critics were Fox, Viacom, and Discovery Communications. On Thursday, the company removed their channels from the service, about a dozen in all — except for Fox News. Even though it took those steps, it added 17 new channels on Friday, thus increasing the overall number of networks available through the service to about three dozen.

Consumers are responding positively to the app: the company reports some 300,000 downloads in just the first two weeks of availability.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, the networks are NBC World, CSPAN, CSPAN2, CSPAN3, Chiller, Disney XD, ESPNnews, G4, HSN, IFC, Jewelry, QVC, Sleuth, SOAPnet, Style, Golf Channel and WeTV. It also included its local news and information channels NY1 News and YNN Austin in those markets.

It’s clearly a sign that Time Warner has no intention of backing down, meaning that we’re probably heading for a showdown between the cable provider and the networks. What remains to be seen is whether Time Warner’s move emboldens other providers to do the same. There’s always power in numbers.

This has the television networks in a tizzy, claiming that their contracts with the cable provider do not give it the right to essentially stream its content. About 32 cable channels are provided through the service, including MTV, HGTV, Discovery, and others.

Central to Time Warner’s argument is that the networks’ signals aren’t being just blindly transmitted over the open internet where anyone could attempt to snoop — the 21st Century equivalent of stealing your neighbor’s cable. Instead, it says the signals would be transmitted over its own “secure network.”

No doubt this is going to be quite a fight, and if the networks were moved enough, they could cut Time Warner’s traditional cable customers off in retaliation. It’s not that easy  a decision though: if they do that, the cable company is under no obligation to pay them the lofty carriage fees that these networks all but live off of.

The question really becomes whether or not Time Warner is within its rights to do so. The cable providers — and the networks, too — have looked the other way while companies like Sling have already done what Time Warner is planning to do. I guess the only difference here is what it is doing could potentially be on a much larger scale.

Indeed, the cables pay some $30 billion annually in carriage fees — but these deals were negotiated long before tablet devices came into vogue.  If Time Warner wants to stream TV networks’ signals, it should negotiate that option.

My feeling is that if this goes to court, the TV networks are going to have the upper hand. I think Time Warner knows this too, and I somewhat expect to see some type of talks between the two sides if the cable provider is serious about providing this feature for its customers.

If things go as Bloomberg’s sources seem to believe, we may see the first AirPlay sets later on this year. It would also be a bit unlike Apple to do so, since traditionally it has preferred to control the experience from top to bottom.

Such an expansion opens up a multitude of possibilities. For example, an iPhone owner would be able to stream videos stored on the phone to any TV with the technology with minimal setup–no Apple TV box required. It would also help Apple to extend itself from just a computer and gadget maker to a technology licensor, which can be even more profitable since there is little overhead to the sale of information.

Currently Apple is reported to make $4 from each device sold with AirPlay on it, according to the Bloomberg report. Technology is already there to allow streaming video, sources say, although licensees are not permitted to access it under the current agreement.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Comcast has struck deals with about two dozen cable and movie channels to provide content. There is some bad news here though. You won’t gain access to the entire lineup of online content — only what is included in your package.

Either way, the move signals an effort by the entertainment industry to get a leg up on illicit distribution of programming. By offering the programming itself, and on-demand, the urge to run for BitTorrent and the like may be lessened for some.

Take the music industry for example. It decided to resist the digital movement, and ended up getting burnt badly. Only now is the industry beginning to gain some foothold in the digital world.

Right now the site is in a pre-launch test phase, and the creators warn that the site may not function at all. Indeed in our own tests we were unable to play any videos. However, if these folks are successful in getting the site off the ground, it could turn the entire industry on its head.

As it stands now, the content providers control how and where you view their content, and technological barriers prevent many from using pirated content. Simply put, the maze of compression and conversion tools, players, and file types are often too complicated for the average consumer.

The Video Bay would make all that unnecessary. All the user would need is a web browser — obtaining pirated material would be as easy as viewing a video on YouTube. That has to scare the entertainment industry.

Of course, the entertainment industry has already been working hard to stop The Pirate Bay, winning a $3.8 million judgement against its creators in April of this  year. It remains to be seen whether that may stop the group, but so far they remain defiant.