Amazon is directly competing with Netflix and other content streaming services with Amazon Prime. Today the company took a significant leap forward and signed a non-exclusive agreement with CBS to offer 2,000 episodes of the broadcasting giant’s library to customers of its video streaming service. This means users will be able to access a total of 9,000 titles from now on, and will also be able to purchase the titles from the Amazon Instant Video store.

Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, but we do know that the 18 TV series that will become available to customers, which include the complete Star Trek, Frasier and Medium, are older content than what you would see on Hulu.

“The deal is interesting because it’s one of the first formal media partnerships for Amazon in content streaming. Competitor Netflix has dominated the space because of its licensing deals for massive amounts of content. But similar to Netflix, Amazon’s content appears to be older content as opposed to new-releases, a market which Apple has been able to corner.”

Apple (though currently not offering a subscription service but working hard towards launching Smart TV) and Hulu, which is in the process of being auctioned off, have indeed been more successful in this area. This is why the price tag on the latter is expected to be pretty steep: the company’s preexisting broadcasting agreements with owners Disney, News Corp. and NBC.

Amazon is rapidly expanding to stay competitive in an even more rapidly expanding market, but this is taking a toll on its margins. In its earnings call the company reported revenue growth of38 percent to $9.86 billion, but profit dropped to $201 compared to $299 million a year earlier. Netflix is also forecasting increased operating expenses, which include over $40 million a year paid to Amazon to host petabytes worth of data.