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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I posted this morning about LG Electronics signing the cable MOU on tru2way. Well, it looks like Funai Electric has also signed it. You may not be familiar with the Funai name, but Funai markets their products under the Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania, and Emerson brand names and also provides ’store brand’ units such as Insignia for Best Buy and Pye for Circuit City.

Picked up from TWICE.

Originally announced as an agreement between Sony and the cable industry, and then signed by additional CE vendors, the tru2way MOU has now been signed by LG Electronics. They’re planning to release tru2way-enabled HDTVs starting in 2009.

Press release below:
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LG Electronics has introduced three new high-speed Blu-ray drives, with 6x read, 6X BD-R write, and 2x BD-RE write, 16x DVD-R/RW and 40x CD-RW speeds. The BE06 is an external USB2.0 writer with a $379.95 MSRP, the GBW-H20L is an internal writer with a $279.95 MSRP, and the GBC-H20L is an internal reader with a $199.95 MSRP. They all feature LG’s SecurDisc™ capabilities, and the writers support LightScribe™ to enable burning labels on compatible media.

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Lately you have have been seeing promo spots for a new TV series Scarlet, which looked like some kind of spy thriller with a female lead, similar to Alias. I’d been catching the spots mainly as a promo inserted into some TiVoCast content such as The Onion. The spots looked fairly high budget with explosions, etc. I was actually thinking of checking out the show just to see what it was like. It has a website and even an entry in IMDB. Here’s one of the versions of the teaser:

Well, there is no such series. It was all an elaborate hoax that is part of a marketing effort for a new line of HDTVs from LG Electronics called, of course, Scarlet. See, it is a ‘TV Series’ as in ‘a series of TVs’. Clever, but at the same time I feel kind of disappointed that I was misled. It feels dishonest to me, and leaves me with a bad feeling about LG. Certainly not what they were going for, I’m sure.

How do you feel about such deceptive viral marketing tactics? Did you get taken by Scarlet?