EPIX, which includes a premium TV channel and video-on-demand service, is a joint venture from Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, and Lionsgate. The agreement includes “new releases such as The Avengers, Iron Man 2, The Hunger Games, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Thor and Rango as well as popular favorites such as Kick Ass, Paranormal Activity 2, True Grit, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Justin Bieber Never Say Never. EPIX also brings original programming including comedy specials and concerts such as Kevin Smith: Burn in Hell and Usher: Live from London.”

Prime members pay $79 per year for unlimited two-day shipping and other perks, like streaming video. With the EPIX deal, Amazon says the Prime Instant Video library now contains over 25,000 movies and TV episodes. As of April, Netflix had over 60,000 streaming titles. Netflix’s exclusive deal with EPIX ended last month, but it too will stream movies like The Hunger Games and The Avengers 90 days after they’re released on EPIX VOD.

Amazon is holding a press conference in Los Angeles on Thursday. It is widely expected to introduce new Kindles at the event, but the choice of location suggests that the company might also announce new streaming video deals that day.

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In a memo to investors, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells said the company’s exclusive content licensing deal with Epix will run out shortly. They also said their agreement to carry Epix content non-exclusively runs out in the middle of 2013.

This is a bit of a surprise — when the licensing deal was signed in 2010, it was widely reported to be a five-year pact worth nearly $1 billion.

UPDATE: Epix’s parent companies can re-up its deal in yearly increments starting next year, but Netflix will have to come up with more money if it wants to keep streaming Epix exclusively.

Also read: Netflix to investors – “We’re taking our profits to Europe!”

Epix is a premium channel jointly owned by Viacom/Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. It currently has pay-TV distribution through a limited number of major providers, Dish Network among them, covering around 30 million cable/satellite/telco homes.

But as evidenced by the recent Viacom/DirecTV renewal negotiations – during which Viacom pushed DirecTV hard to pick the service up — Epix’s pay-TV distribution outlook could soon change.

Meanwhile, with Viacom and Redbox finally releasing more details about their joint streaming venture Tuesday, several analysts wondered if an Epix deal similar to what Netflix has structured would be part of the content mix.

As the channel becomes less “exclusive” to Netflix, Hastings said it has less value — the streaming service’s biggest drivers, he told investors, are programs that are hard to find in the aftermarket outside of Netflix, such as re-runs of AMC series Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

“Epix is not a particularly large source of our viewing,” Hastings said.

What, really? It’s not important?

Certainly, with Starz taking Disney and Sony Pictures movies in the pay TV window with it when it vacated Netflix in February, the Epix deal brought the streaming service some big-name motion pictures it has been lacking. For example, this summer, Netflix subscribers have been able to stream the Paramount-distributed 2011 summer blockbuster Thor, and Lionsgate’s spring mega-hit Hunger Games is coming up.

Hastings did note, however, that any cost savings from not having Epix content on the service exclusively — or at all — would be re-invested into other programming.

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But according to DirecTV, the sticking point in its ongoing carriage impasse with Viacom is … wait for it … the fledgling pay channel Epix.

On Wednesday — just more than a week after Viacom channels were pulled off the set-tops of DirecTV’s nearly 20 million subscribers — both sides ramped up the rhetoric.

Also read: Why doesn’t pay channel Epix switch to an over-the-top model?

Viacom hit first in a late-afternoon statement, dismissing any notion that a deal is close at hand and accusing DirecTV of “moving backwards” in negotiations.

Elaborating for paidContent, a Viacom spokesman called this notion “DirecTV spin,” adding, it’s “a fabrication designed to deceive their customers and discourage them from moving to other distributors.”

Also read: Analysts – DirecTV/Viacom battle will come down to digital rights

Responded DirecTV: “Viacom’s current statement on our negotiations is completely inaccurate. They made a proposal last night for our carriage of the 17 channels they pulled from DirecTV, and we accepted all material terms for those channels including an increase that was more than fair. We are ready to close this deal at anytime and restore those channels to our customers.

“However, as part of that offer, Viacom insists that we carry the Epix channel at an additional cost of more than half a billion dollars. We know our customers don’t want to pay such an extreme price for an extra channel, they simply want the ones they had returned to them.”

Also read: DirecTV – “Viacom is forcing this bundle on you, not us”

And on and on it went, with Viacom’s PR team later “updating” the company blog saying, essentially, that it also offered DirecTV proposals that didn’t include Epix, and the satellite carrier passed on those, too.

“Nothing in the [DirecTV] press release reflects the reality of the negotiations, which, sadly, are at an impasse,” the Viacom missive added.

Currently, Epix touts about 30 million subscribers, but it only counts carriage on four of the top 10 pay TV services — Dish Network, Verizon FiOS, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. It also has a licensing deal with Netflix.

The premium channel is a joint venture between Viacom, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And getting carriage on the No. 2 pay TV service in the U.S. would certainly be a vital next step in its evolution.

Logic, of course, says this impasse can’t exist for much longer: DirecTV provides Viacom with about 20 percent of its U.S. coverage, and Viacom channels deliver DirecTV about 20 percent of its viewing.

In a note to investors Monday, Bernstein Research senior analysts Todd Juenger and Craig Moffett wrote that the haggling will inevitably end. But that it might go on for a while, with no “Linsanity” moment on the horizon.

(For those of you who missed out in February, an entrenched Time Warner Cable caved into the demands of regional sports network MSG after dissonant fans of a moribund New York Knicks pro basketball team suddenly became energized by the emergence of point guard Jeremy Lin, father of the so-called “Linsanity” media phenomenon. Astoundingly but perhaps not surprisingly, MSG/Knicks/Cablevision impressario James Dolan on Wednesday allowed Lin to sign with another team, the Houston Rockets, choosing not to match a contract offer.)

Back on subject, we see one very definitive signpost up ahead for DirecTV — its August 2nd second-quarter earnings report. Should the El Segundo, Calif.-based carrier report significant subscriber losses and no dealmaking progress to investors, we DirecTV subscribers might have access to Epix very soon.

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New apps for EPIX, ESPN, Hulu Plus, Netflix and NBC’s Today will become available on Tuesday in the U.S. Abroad, Lovefilm (U.K.), Mediaset’s Premium Play (Italy), Telefónica’s Movistar Imagenio (Spain) and Sky Go (Austria and Germany) will launch. Meanwhile, the Hulu app will be available in Japan and Netflix will also launch in Canada as well.

Later in December, U.S. audiences will be treated to apps from Crackle, Dailymotion, iHeartRadio, MSN, MSNBC, TMZ, UFC, Verizon FiOS, Vevo, Vudu and YouTube. CinemaNow, HBO Go, MLB.tv and Comcast Xfinity On Demand will be introduced in early 2012. Internationally, Xbox users will get access in December to a wide range of content, including 4 on Demand and Demand 5 in the UK, Canal+’s Digi+ and GolTV in Spain, and Rogers on Demand and UFC in Canada. YouTube, MLB.tv and others will be available in multiple international markets. (A full list is available here.)

Yes, Microsoft is moving beyond just supporting the streaming players, and making content from the traditional TV world available as well. But what’s most interesting about the combination is not that all that content is available, but that it’s available through the same search interface.

Consumer electronics manufacturers like Samsung and Sony are also beginning to get apps from the likes of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, HBO and other content partners. But so far, it seems like most of those implementations are based on siloed experiences. In other words: you open the Samsung app store, open the HBO app, search for a show, watch it, exit, open the Comcast app, watch another show, etc. There’s no good way to surface content from multiple providers.

Built into the Xbox Live implementation, however, is a unified search mechanism powered by its Bing search engine. When a user searches for a movie like Iron Man, he or she will be able to watch it through any number of services — whether it be through the Epix app, the Netflix app, or one of the pay-per-view apps like Microsoft Zune marketplace or Vudu. That will help users get to a lot of the content they want to watch sooner, without worrying about whichever service it’s actually available on.

We’ve been big proponents of the need for better discovery mechanisms for video, as the number of titles and number of providers continues to increase. There have been a few companies that have attempted to take this problem on so far: TiVo has been doing unified search for years, allowing viewers to navigate live TV and video-on-demand services through a single search mechanism. Google TV also offered a similar functionality, with search through live TV, VOD and online services like Netflix and Hulu Plus.

But the new Xbox interface is the first service to tackle the discovery issue at scale — both due to its massive install base, with 35 million Xbox Live subscribers, and with more than 40 content partners soon available through the service. There’s just one drawback currently, which we’re hoping Xbox figures out: For now, it’s limiting Bing search to full-length, premium content — basically just TV shows and movies. While it’s nice to see content from Netflix and Verizon next to each other, it will be even nicer to be able to browse and discover new shows from YouTube alongside TV episodes from Hulu Plus.

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Microsoft is aggressively adding new content sources to Xbox Live, bringing in video content from cable providers and TV networks such as Verizon, Comcast, HBO and Epix, among others. And it’s adding a universal search layer on top of those apps, enabling Xbox Live users to search for bits of content across multiple apps and choose between them. So a user searching for Harry Potter could be shown choices from Netflix, Comcast’s video-on-demand library, HBO and Microsoft’s own Zune marketplace.

Today, that search is being driven primarily by metadata given by the content provider. But technology from VideoSurf could provide more information to Xbox Live’s search capabilities. It does that through facial recognition and other techniques that will allow Xbox Live to identify actors and other key information within a scene.

That might not be as important when a user is searching for video from a TV or film content provider like Comcast or HBO, but it could come into play as Microsoft adds more independent video content. One of the newest partners for Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform will be YouTube, which typically doesn’t have as much data associated with videos as premium content providers. That makes searching and navigating the billions of videos on YouTube a bit more difficult unless you have smart search technology to do so.

While the primary plan is for VideoSurf to be embedded into Xbox Live, it could also give Microsoft hooks into other connected boxes. VideoSurf provides the backend search technology for the Boxee Box by D-Link, for instance. The acquisition could also help differentiate Microsoft’s broader search ambitions, by providing more info for its Bing video search engine.

VideoSurf was founded in 2006 and has raised $28 million since then, from investors like former Vice President Al Gore, Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg and others.

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ClipSync Moments gives viewers the ability to share videos with friends on social networks. But instead of sharing a link to the entire video and having their friends search for the part it refers to, ClipSync attaches comments to a specific moment in time. Once connections on social networks click through a ClipSync Moments link, they’ll be taken to the video moment — and comment — in question. That helpspublishers to achieve a viral effect that can increase viewership of their videos through social sharing.

But the product isn’t just for drawing viewers in from other networks: It can also increase engagement among viewers that choose to watch a video that their friends have already commented on. When choosing such a video, users will be able to see their friends’ comments pop up during the course of the film, and can respond to those comments, adding to the conversation about particular moments.

ClipSync Moments is similar to social sharing implementations that some publishers have already rolled out. Most notably, it’s like Hulu’s Facebook Connect integration, which lets viewers share videos and comments with their Facebook friends, with links pointing to a specific moment in the video when clicked. But by making Moments available to multiple third parties, ClipSync is hoping to standardize the way this sharing happens.

ClipSync has signed up a few of its existing customers as launch partners for the new product. Epix, IFC, RealNetworks and Major League Gaming will all introduce ClipSync Moments as part of their online viewing sites. ClipSync CEO Itzik Cohen told us in a phone interview that the company has more customers on tap to take advantage of the product, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

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The new Roku LT will be able to display video with 720p and have access to most of the Roku channel store, with the exception of the casual games the company recently launched. That’s because it doesn’t come with Bluetooth support, which is necessary to use any of Roku’s new gaming remote controls. The device also doesn’t offer any SD card slot or Ethernet port, but comes with Wifi built in.

Roku also announced the launch of an HBO Go channel on Tuesday. It’s the second TV Everywhere offering on the box after Epix; viewers of both services have to authenticate themselves as pay TV subscribers first before they have access to the respective content. The channel will be available on all Roku devices, including the legacy boxes.

Wood had previously told me that a significant number of the company’s customers have cut the cord. On Monday, he reiterated that point, only to turn it into a sales pitch for TV Everywhere: “20 percent have canceled their cable, but 80 percent still have cable,” he told me, adding that Epix has proven to be extremely popular on Roku — something that even caught Wood by surprise. “This is a big deal,” he said. “Lots of people want this content.”

Check out the video below for a closer look at the Roku 2 the company launched earlier this summer:

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The service first became available in late 2009 with a live cable channel and a corresponding website, EpixHD.com, which put more than 3,000 film titles from library partners available online. Since launch, it has expanded both its number of distribution partners and number of subscribers, thanks in part to that value proposition. The channel is now available through Dish Network, Verizon FiOS, Cox, Charter, Mediacom, Suddenlink and the National Cable and Telecommunications Cooperative (NCTC). Together, those distributors have more than 30 million subscribers, of which Epix has managed to sign up 9 million to its network.

Of course, the idea of adding an online component to its linear cable channel has caught on with much of the rest of the cable industry, which is making a big push behind TV Everywhere. That initiative will allows viewers to watch streaming video from their favorite networks online, so long as they’ve logged in with their cable ID. HBO, for instance, is making all of its original programming available to authenticated subscribers, as well as whatever movies it has the rights for at any given time.

No longer the only provider in town with a linear cable and streaming offering, Epix has set out to differentiate itself in other ways. One way it’s doing that is by aggressively building apps for new devices, so subscribers can access its streaming content through connected TVs, Blu-ray players, streaming set-top boxes and mobile devices. The network is already available on more than 100 different devices, and is looking to add more. It already has apps available on Google TV-powered devices, as well as Samsung TV, Roku set-top boxes, the RIM Playbook and Android mobile phones and tablets. And, of course, it’s working to get an iPad app out, which we’ve been told is “coming soon.”

Another way Epix seeks to differentiate itself is with content you can’t find anywhere else. Now that the network has its library online, Epix Head of Digital Emil Rensing told me in a phone interview that the next step in the company’s evolution is in creating more of its own exclusive content. That means both long-form specials and documentaries, as well as bonus programming which it can place alongside films in its streaming library.

So far, its long-form original programming has mostly been comedy specials and concerts, including Louis C.K.’s Hilarious or Bon Jovi’s The Circle Tour. But it has also obtained a few documentaries, including William Shatner’s The Captains.

Those originals have actually proven to be extremely popular amongst Epix users. The Craig Ferguson comedy special Does This Need To Be Said and exclusive documentary Lindsey Vonn: In the Moment are among the site’s top movies, alongside major studio content like Iron Man 2, Kick-Ass, Shutter Island, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Star Trek.

Epix is also working to add videos that provide additional value to the films that come from the studios. That includes creating packages of content based on studio stills and additional footage that might not have made it into films. It’s also building more behind-the-scenes type content for newer films released by its studio partners, working with them during filming and in the run-up to release to get interviews with the cast and crew to provide more context.

Finally, Epix is also leveraging partnerships to bring in interesting original video content. For instance, check out this video from IndyMogul’s Eric Beck on how to recreate the Iron Man chest piece for really, really cheap. Rensing expects more of these types of videos in the future.

It’s difficult to launch any new cable network — just ask Oprah how her venture is doing — but it’s incredibly hard to launch a new network that cable subscribers have to pay for, especially when you’re going up against HBO and Showtime. That said, Epix seems to be doing well so far. The network is already profitable, due in part to a deal it did with Netflix to make its content available as part of that subscription streaming service. According to CEO Mark Greenberg, that hasn’t stopped Epix from signing up more traditional distributors, and the network is in talks to add even more pay TV partners in the near future.

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