Sony To Unveil Web-Enabled Blu-Ray

Disc Player That Can Download Trailers And Games From The Internet Will Debut This Summer

(AP)  Sony Corp.'s first Blu-ray disc player that can download bonus materials like trailers and games from the Internet will debut this summer, the company announced Tuesday.

It will be the first new player from Sony, the inventor of Blu-ray, since the format beat out the other technology that vied to become the high-definition replacement for the DVD.

Toshiba Corp. announced last week that it would stop making players for the HD DVD, the disc it invented, mainly because Warner Bros. Entertainment said it would drop the format to focus on Blu-ray discs.

The BDP-S350 player Sony plans to introduce this summer for "about $400" will be the company's first to feature an Ethernet port, allowing it to connect to a home broadband connection. However, it won't be able to access Internet content when it ships

a software upgrade will be available later to enable that feature, known as BD-Live.

A second player, the BDP-S550, will be available this fall for "about $500" and will be BD-Live-capable when it ships.

Both players can show picture-in-picture content and will be the first Sony Blu-ray players to do so, apart from the PlayStation 3 game console, which gained this feature via software update last year.

The picture-in-picture feature, called Bonus View, can be used to show director or actor commentary in a small window while the movie plays.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the parent of the Panasonic brand, introduced a Bonus View player late last year and has announced it will ship a BD-Live player this spring.

In these respects, Blu-ray players are playing catch-up to HD DVD players, which have had Internet- and picture-in-picture capabilities since they first came out in 2006.

[bwessels]

Half way to trumping Apple TV. I wonder why they stopped at bonus material. Does Sony do the manufacturing for Apple TV?

[rf35]

Not sure what personal information they can get from a DVD player, but whatever. Now if they come out with one that includes Internet browsing capability, then there''s a problem. Right now, the most they could do is figure out what movies you access the Web content with and maybe target some advertising if you had to pay for such content.

[brianbwb-2009]

Avoid this like the plague, Ebola, and AIDs all mixed up.

This is the logical extension of the infamous Sony rootkit, which will call home to Sony, divulging your private information, whether or not you want it to, and it is possible that if you attempt to remove it, just like the original rootkit, your drive will become a $400 brick.

It is obvious that Sony will ignore the lessons from the original rootkit, because the liability will still be less than the profits, so your privacy will be sold to the highest bidder.

Perhaps we should boycott Sony, at least until we have concrete assurances from them that they will no longer indulge in such invasions of privacy.

[rf35]

This is nasty can of worms. I suppose you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee to access anything worth watching. And once you connect to the Internet, you get the malware issue. Later incarnations will probably have a hard drive. I''ll stick to whatever comes on the disk, thank you very much.

[richnj1]

Friends: beware of "Web-enabled" players. At first, it will be just for so-called "bonus" content. Then they will claim to detect and refuse to play so-called "bootleg" copies of discs. Finally, they will figure out some way to effectively make us captive to a pay-per-view system in our own homes.