It was quite disheartening last month when Doctor Who was removed from all online streaming services. Especially now when cord cutting and cancelling cable subscriptions is becoming more an more commonplace. Some speculated that the BBC was planning on launching its own streaming service where the show would be exclusively available, but there has been no hard evidence for that being the case.
Now news comes in this morning that Amazon and BBC Worldwide have entered into a multi-year content licensing agreement to make Doctor Who available for streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime.
Season 1-8 will be available on for US Amazon Prime subscribers starting on 27 March. Series 9 will be made available in the fall of 2016.
To be honest this still seems like a strange move. I’m guessing some bigwig somewhere decided to hold off giving Series 9 out for free in the hopes that they would sell a few more Blu-rays or copies on iTunes. But in a year where there will be no new Doctor Who until Christmas it makes more sense to promote the hell out of the show being available everywhere to watch and get caught up before series 10 airs.
Also, the press release makes no mention of classic Doctor Who most of which was previously available on Hulu and is now only available as a limited selection both on DVD and iTunes. We can only hope that iTunes starts expanding its selection to include the entire classic catalog soon.