Technology giant Amazon.com Inc. announced Wednesday that the company’s paid subscription service for streaming media, Amazon Prime, will now offer virtual reality shows and movies for Oculus headsets.

The new service, named Prime Video VR, offers everything in the Amazon Prime library for display in a private virtual setting, including ordinary 2-D TV shows and movies, as well as a new curated selection of 360-degree videos. The Prime Video VR app is available immediately for Oculus Go, Oculus Quest and Samsung Gear VR and more information is available on Amazon’s Prime VR Portal.

For normal Prime Video content, users are greeted with their own personal virtual theater rendered in VR where the content is streamed on a giant screen. Accessibility to the media is driven by a voice-powered search, making it easier and hands-free to find content to watch.

As for VR content, Amazon Prime VR will launch with 10 handpicked 360-degree videos, according to a blog post from Oculus. Such titles include “INVASION!,” a story of two bunnies who fend off an alien attack on planet Earth, and “Greenland Melting,” an immersive documentary from Frontline and Nova detailing the effects of climate change on the arctic island of Greenland.

Amazon plans to continue to add curated VR content to Prime Video for Prime subscribers to consume. Amazon members who do not subscribe to Prime cannot access VR-specific content but can still watch anything from their personal library in VR. The Prime Video VR app is free to download.

The entrance of Amazon into the VR video streaming marketplace follows services such as Netflix, Hulu and YouTube — all media streaming companies that already have VR apps. The draw of immersive storytelling has also been such that journalism outfits have begun to build their own VR news teams such as CNN’s VR journalism unit and Time Inc.’s mixed reality app Time Immersive. According to research from ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global virtual reality market is expected to reach $44 billion by 2024, up from $7.9 billion during 2018. 

The research also indicates that much of this growth is being driven by gaming and entertainment alongside increased interest from giant technology companies such as Amazon and Google. As headsets become cheaper and more accessible, that has continued to open up more market penetration and audience for VR-driven immersive media.

Image: Amazon