Panasonic Announces Pricing for DMP-BD50 $699 MSRP

[CharlyD]

In Neil's demo, he shows additional music tracks being added to the program. It wouldn't take many multichannel/hi-rez tracks to fill 1GB. And HD video content would fill 1GB in a hurry. Also this memory is shared across all BD-Live enabled disks. Seems like the USB-connected external HDD storage or a NAS would make more sense.

[rex]

Although BD-live opens the door to interesting possibilities, it is still very unclear how important this feature will be. Since there is plenty of storage space on a Blu disc for extra features, studios may prefer to include all extra features on the disc itself, in which case the BD-live feature may not be used much. Still, I prefer to keep an open mind, and wait to see what happens with this interesting new technology, unlike many on this forum who simply dismiss it as being totally useless. We will have to wait to see how much it is actually used by both consumers and studios.

[deacongreg]

You know what I`m waiting for, what we should already have. That every Blu-Ray movie, plays in every Blu-Ray player, without firmware updates and the like. Lets get there first, then worry about additional features and benefits later. Lets take care of home, first!! Back to the basics, if necessary.

[wes]

I could care less with online downloads I like to watch a good movie with the best picture quality and the best sound DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 period. I could not agree more, let's get the basic covered first and make sure that all blu ray movies play without any additional software and son on.

[CharlyD]

I think media servers will become a lot more commonplace in the not too distant future and to be offering devices that include their own closed storage systems makes little sense - especially if adding that storage causes even minor increases to the price or complexity. The only way BD-Live would be a reasonable feature would be to enable the service only if external storage is detected on the network - an easy task with UPnP. Or, of course, if the player already has mass storage (e.g. PS3).

I heartlily agree that basic functionality should be rock solid before even considering features like BD-Live that will only see limited use.

[wes]

Yes the ultimate movie server:

iMac with HDMi (may be one day Apple will adopt HDMi?) with 6T of hard drive