Analysis of network Blueray players. Don't blink!

Don't blink things are moving fast!  I can't believe how fast device manufactures are adopting Internet streaming and how many deals have been cut on the back end. So let me start with a particular arbitrary Blueray player and work backwards from there.

I have been reading through the Samsung BD-P3600 manual, not that I have particular reason for looking at Samsung first I just happen to hit it first in Google.

LG actually seems to be the most active in this area, and if I have the time I will go through their product manuals also.

I suspect most of the Blue Ray Profile 2.0 players are offering very similar functionality.

The Samsung Blueray players supports 4 streaming web sites:

• Blockbuster
• Netflix
• Pandora
• Youtube 
  
• Surprisingly they are not supporting HULU!  
• BD-LIVE
  

BlockBuster
For those not in the United States, they are the Largest Brick and Morter movie rental company. Starting with VHS and now mostly DVD and starting to offer BlueRay and rumors of SD and USB Flash Drives.   I will be writing an article on this next. 



When examining the Samsung manual I found a really interesting thing.

The images below was grabbed from the PDF of the Samsung BD-P3600 manual



Notice the little "Powered by Cinema Now" at the bottom right of the Blockbuster menu screen.



Wow! I must have blinked and missed this.

CinemaNow is interesting because they offer a Streaming movie rental service too.
They were aquired by Roxio some time back. Roxio does DVD creation software.

Seems a deal was cut in January of 2009
Blockbuster finally makes big online move with CinemaNow
Blockbuster is still looking for ways to compete with Netflix. With a new partnership announced today, the video rental chain will now offer online movie streaming through CinemaNow, but playing catch-up won't be enough to overtake its popular competitor.

Roxio is a division of  Sonic Solutions (NASDAQ: SNIC; http://www.sonic.com)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Solutions

Sonic Solutions was created in 1986 by former Lucasfilm employees who developed the SoundDroid digital audio editing system as part of the Droidworks project. (Another notable spinoff of the project is Pixar.)

In 2002, Sonic spun off their entire audio division as Sonic Studio, LLC, to concentrate solely on the DVD marketplace. With the acquisition of the Desktop and Mobile Division (DMD) of VERITAS Software Corporation in 2002 and the acquisition of Roxio in 2003, Sonic increased its focus on consumer media creation software

VERITAS ?!?! They make enterprise backup software NetBackup. What they heck are they doing here!

Sonic to Acquire CinemaNow  Nov 2008

Sonic's technology solutions and Roxio applications power the management and playback of Hollywood content on PCs and CE devices

This picture gives you some Idea of what the menu screens on the BlueRay player look like.
Sorry the manual was only in Black and White.

Next YouTube.
I hope you are all familiar with by now. You know now owned by Google.



Above is what YouTube looked like in the manual.

BD-LIVE



What is BD-LIVE, this is all they had in the manual.

From Wikipedia

The biggest difference between Bonus View and BD-Live is that BD-Live requires the Blu-ray Disc player to have an Internet connection (usually via a standard Ethernet RJ-45 network port) to access Internet-based content. BD-Live features have included Internet chats, scheduled chats with the director, Internet games, downloadable featurettes, downloadable quizzes, and downloadable movie trailers.^[86][87][88]

Web site  What is BD-LIVE?



USE of Opensource GPL Code!