Cutting the Cord: Hit the books with The Great Courses on Amazon Prime

Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story included a course available on Amazon Video, but not as part of The Great Courses.

Amazon's streaming video service has become a destination for binge-watching TV series, such as The Wire, Justified and original shows like Mozart in the Jungle. Now it's a place to learn about ancient history, religion and Mozart himself.

The latest available add-on subscription to Amazon Prime — or the monthly Amazon Video service — is The Great Courses Signature Collection, consisting of 87 courses covering subjects such as philosophy, ancient and modern history, photography, professional development, science and cooking.

Amazon Prime members ($99 annually or $10.99 monthly, includes video and free shipping) and subscribers to Amazon Video ($8.99 monthly) can add the collection for $7.99 monthly. (Note: There's a seven-day free trial that lets you test the service, too.)

Amazon targets Netflix with standalone video sub

That's a good deal, considering that The Great Courses Plus stand-alone streaming service, launched last year, costs $179.99 annually ($14.99 each month) or $19.99 for a month-to-month subscription. This Signature Collection offering on Amazon may have only about 30% of the stand-alone service's 300 courses, but those include many of the most popular ones, representing about 40% of the most streamed choices, the companies say.

For the Chantilly, Va.-based company, the move to Amazon made sense, says Ed Leon, chief brand officer of The Great Courses. "Launching on Amazon Prime, with its broad membership, ease of use and instant access to hundreds of digital TVs and devices, is a smart next step because it allows us to reach millions of new customers," he said. "And because Signature Collection offers a curated library of popular and highly rated courses, we can deliver our brand of premium life-long learning in an even more affordable way."

Each course typically has a dozen or more half-hour lectures on the subject. Want to improve your skills in the kitchen? "The Everyday Gourmet: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking" has 24 individual video lectures from Chef Bill Briwa of The Culinary Institute of America on cooking of meats, stocks and broths, sauces, salads, soups and desserts, as well as techniques and tools.

Need to improve your business acumen? Another entry,  "Critical Business Skills for Success," hosted by a quintet of business professors, has 60 lectures on business strategy, disruptive innovations, mergers and acquisitions, analyzing income statements and other financial statements, branding, marketing and social media.

Oh, and about Mozart: In "The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works," music historian Robert Greenberg describes what it would have been like to see the young Mozart play at the time and breaks down his Piano Sonata in C Minor, K. 457 (the fourth lecture of two dozen). "Mozart single-handedly turned the piano sonata from a small-scale genre intended for amateur amusement into a large-scale virtuosic genre," he says.

Maybe Amazon and The Great Courses, in concert, can turn streaming video into a new binge-watching genre, too.

"Cutting the Cord" is a regular column covering Net TV and ways to get it. If you have suggestions or questions, contact Mike Snider at msnider@usatoday.com. And follow him on Twitter: @MikeSnider.