Patrick Byrne
Patrick Byrne

Amazon is going to have another competitor in the video market starting this year. Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne announced that his company plans to add a new video offering to its Amazon Prime-esque Club O loyalty program at the National Association of Television Program Executives conference today, according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter.

Byrne said that the video would be provided by an as-yet unnamed third party, and Overstock will have a video-on-demand service ready by the middle of this year that would allow people to purchase 30,000 video titles. After that, Overstock will launch a streaming video service, probably by the end of this year. That service, which would be similar to offerings from Netflix and Amazon, would require users pay an as-yet-unspecified fee for the privilege of streaming content from Overstock’s catalog.

It’s a move to attract more customers to Overstock and encourage them to spend more money on the online shopping site.

“We already have the traffic,” Byrne said. “We’re looking for a bigger and bigger share of their wallet.”

In addition to bringing in existing video content, Overstock plans to partner with outside producers to create original content for its service. It’s similar to what Netflix and Amazon have done with their own streaming catalogs in order to draw in users.

It’s not clear how successful Overstock’s push will be. Creating high-quality original video is difficult – just ask Hulu, which has been trying to catch viewers’ attention with a slate of original programming, but hasn’t received much critical recognition for its work.

All of this comes as Amazon is pushing ahead with its own video ambitions. “Transparent,” one of the company’s original comedies, just won two Golden Globe awards, and Amazon just launched a new season of original video pilots.

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