Roku Inc. announced today that it is giving consumers even more reason to purchase its digital set-top box, with the addition of pay-per-view video content from Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN).

Under the terms of the partnership, owners of Roku's digital video player will soon have access to more than 40,000 video titles, which will be available for rent at prices that range from $0.99 to $3.99 per view. When the Amazon content becomes available, sometime in the first quarter, new videos appear as soon the DVDs are available for purchase.

Roku's digital set-top box, formerly known as the "Netflix Player by Roku," was launched last year as the first device that would allow Netflix subscribers to view videos from its Watch Instantly streaming video service directly on their television sets.

Since then, Netflix has expanded its streaming availability to include Blu-ray disc players by LG Electronics and Samsung, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and TiVo DVRs. Just today, Netflix added LG Broadband HDTVs to that list.

While Netflix was busy adding consumer electronic devices to stream to, Roku has spent the last several months looking for other content partners that could be enabled on its digital video player.

Last September, Roku CEO Anthony Wood told an audience at Streaming Media West that Roku was working on issuing a software development kit (SDK) that would allow Web publishers to connect to the Roku player. At the same time, Roku has been contacting content owners like Amazon directly as a way to get more video content on the Roku box.

Tim Twerdahl, the company's vice president of consumer products, says Roku owners should expect more content to become available in the first half of 2009. "We're looking to create an open platform for a number of different business models and content types," Twerdahl says.

Amazon is the second major content partner available on the Roku box and represents the second type of business model that Roku hopes to enable.

"With Netflix we have a subscription-based model, and with Amazon we have transactional," Twerdahl says. "We're also working very hard to get ad-supported video" on the Roku player.

The Amazon deal was also significant because Roku used the yet-to-be-released SDK in rolling the new service out. Twerdahl says Roku will probably use the SDK for another one or two internal projects before releasing it into the wild later this year, allowing anyone to develop for the Roku platform.

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