In a significant tie up in the television entertainment scene, Netflix Inc has struck a deal with TiVo Inc in its bid to realise its goal of offering its web streaming service directly to TV sets.

As per the deal, it is believed that Netflix would provide its online DVD rental service subscribers and as many as 800,000 broadband-connected Tivo subscribers access to streaming movies and TV episodes from Netflix’s Watch Instantly service to TVs. And this will come free of charge. Several thousand US households have been chosen by digital video recorder TiVo and Netflix for initiating a test of the new capability.

Watch Instantly is a web streaming service, which boasts of a library of more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes. This service is offered free to its more than 8 million subscribers. It is expected that the new service will be available in the whole of the US in early December.

The new initiative is seen as Netflix’s strategy to figure out the right business model, and get their content on as many platforms as available. Industry sources said that the company is moving aggressively to extend that streaming service from the PC to TV.  It has enough and ore competition on ths fron t from majors such as Apple Inc and Amazon.com.

It may be recalled that Netflix had recently inked a deal with Samsung Electronics’s Blu-ray DVD devices to play video streamed from Netflix. Likewise, a similar deal with Blu-ray DVD player maker LG Electronics was also reached. Besides, the company has agreements to stream movies to Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360 videogame consoles and to a $100 set-top box made by Roku Inc, said reports.

Besides, the other new partner, TiVo, has already launched new add-on features to help differentiate its DVRs from that of cable and satellite TV providers. These add-ons allow users to rent videos from Amazon and watch them on TVs. They also enable users to watch online videos from Google’s YouTube on their TV sets.

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