Not long after Amazon introduced its media-friendly Kindle Fire HD, Barnes & Noble has announced Nook Video, a service for streaming and downloading video. The bookseller has signed deals with HBO, Starz, Viacom, Warner Bros., Disney, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, with other partners to be announced later. It's touting The Avengers, Breaking Bad, and The Daily Show among the content it will be offering when it launches this fall in the US and a few months later in the UK. Nook Tablets already include access to Netflix and Hulu, but this marks a larger move into the multimedia market.

When the service launches, customers will be asked to use a dedicated video app, which will sync content through the Nook Cloud that's currently used for reading material. Barnes & Noble is also building in support for UltraViolet, giving customers who buy a DVD or Blu-ray access to a digital copy on the Nook app. UltraViolet has struggled to get off the ground, and a similar deal with Amazon hasn't made much progress, so this could mean both a bigger digital distribution presence for Barnes & Noble and another chance to push UltraViolet into the mainstream for studios.