Back in January Netflix announced a partnership with LG Electronics to embed the Netflix streaming player in various LG products. At the time it was expected to be included in an LG dual-format player, HD DVD and BD, of course HD DVD has since died. Today LG announced the first product to bear fruit from this partnetship, the BD300 Blu-ray player.

The BD300 is a full-featured Blu-ray player with BonusView / Profile 1.1 and BD-Live / Profile 2.0 support, with 1080p DVD upscaling, and, of course, Netflix instant viewing support. Netflix, and BD-Live, support use a built-in wired Ethernet connection. As with the Roku Netflix Player, users will add titles to their queue via the netflix website, then they’ll have instant access to those titles from the LG deck. When a title is selected playback will begin in as little as 30 seconds. You’ll also be able to read synopsis and rate movies from the interface.

The full press release is below:
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Sun Microsystems Tuesday announced a new website, BDLive.com, to assist developers in creating BD-Live content, which, of course uses Sun’s Java programming language. Sun established the website in cooperation with Related Content Database Inc., and as part of the site launch they’re making available to developers a free Blu-ray disc with sample code, definitions of the available APIs, and the ability for developers to share their creations online and to download applications to their Blu-ray system. The discs are available only while supplies last.

From the Blu-ray Stats News Log.

Korean company Dreamer yesterday announced their BIDDLE™ Technology, which appears to be a BD-Live based platform for Blu-ray players to act as broadband content set-top boxes. The BIDDLE technology is currently used by over one million customers in Korea where it is used by #1 IPTV provider Korea Telecom and #1 cable MSO CJ CableNet. Checking out the website, it really looks like quiet an interesting platform, above and beyond the conventional BD-Live content we’ve seen announced to date, or the online content HD DVD used to have. It looks like it could really be a content delivery platform to turn any BD-Live enabled device into a receiver for broadband content.

Here’s Dreamer’s press release:
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Well, that was fast. Less than a week ago Sony announced that the PlayStation3’s 2.20 firmware would include BD-Live support, amongst other things, and it is now available. So gentlemen, and ladies, start your upgrades!

Via EngadgetHD.

Sony has announced that the next firmware update for the PlayStation3, 2.20, will include BD-Live support, aka Blu-ray Profile 2.0, and it will street in ‘late March’. Since there are only 11 days left in the month, that means we’ll see it very soon. In one fell swoop this will make the vast majority of Blu-ray players in the world BD-Live capable, which should encourage more studios to make use of the technology. And it should help put pressure on the standalone player vendors to step up and release BD-Live enabled decks.

Unfortunately, this firmware update does not include the hoped for addition of DTS-HD Master Audio support. DTS-MA is the one major audio codec the PS3 lacks. It will internally decode Dolby TrueHD and output it as uncompress PCM, but there is no support for DTS-MA at this time. The PS3 will not bitstream TrueHD, and this is believed to be a limitation of the HDMI chipset used. So it is unlikely that the current PS3 HW could ever bitstream TrueHD or DTS-MA, but it could internally decode DTS-MA and output the uncompressed PCM, as it does with TrueHD, for the same end result. Perhaps Sony will update the HDMI chipset in future PS revisions to allow bitstreaming.

BD-Live isn’t the only addition in 2.20. PSP owners will be able to copy their photo and music playlists from the PS3 to the handheld. And there are other new additions:

• “Resume play” will enable PS3 system to start playing a Blu-ray disc and DVD at the point it was stopped, even if the disc had been removed.(*1)
• “Audio Output Device” will be a new Remote Play setting, enabling PSP to serve as a remote control for music played through PS3.
• PS3 system’s Internet browser will be enhanced: Video files directly linked from a Web page will be able to be streamed, and the browser’s view speed will be improved.
• DivX and WMV format videos that are larger than 2GB will be playable.
• “Mosquito Noise Reduction” will be added as an AV setting in the control panel of the DVD/BD player for improved movie playback.(*2)

*1 BD-J format disc is not supported.
*2 BD discs recorded with BDMV format are not supported.

Here’s the full press release:
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