Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

We hate to say we called it, but our complete in-the-dark guess of just under four C-notes was right on the money. LG has just announced that it’s BD300 Network Blu-ray player (and Netflix streamer) will begin shipping to national retailers (Best Buy, Circuit City, Bass Pro Shops, etc.) next month (as in, a month later than initially anticipated) for $399.95. Not the cheapest BonusView-enabled deck in the mix, but given the Netflix functionality tossed in on the side, we can still see quite a few folks joining the BD camp with this one. Matter of fact, we’ll just go ahead and ask — is this your ticket into the Blu?

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Looks like Movie Gallery finally got something for the assortment of PBS bandwidth and spare parts remaining from the now-defunct MovieBeam service. The new owner is Indian conglomerate The Valuable Group, headed by Sanjay Gaikwad who apparently thinks serving up a remarkably limited assortment of heavily compressed HD and SD movies on demand is an idea that deserves to fail all over the world, instead of just in the U.S. Since $100 million burned up by Disney and others wasn’t enough to make things work, he plans to invest a similar amount over the next two years to relaunch the service in North America, the U.K. and “other overseas markets”. Variety notes The Valuable Group already delivers movies digitally to India and South Asian theaters via satellite so maybe they know something we don’t about this business model, and with plans to roll out service in three markets with “new, cutting edge features” by year end we’ll get to find out soon.

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Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment

It doesn’t seem like those Sony firmware engineers will be a getting a break any time soon. With the PlayStation 3’s v2.30 firmware and its DTS-HD MA / PS store upgrades barely settled Sony Senior VP Peter Dille jumped on the official PlayStation blog to let us know what the rest of 2008 has in store. In-game XMB? On the way this year, along with a video service that “separates the service from others you’ve seen or used…to give you the TV, movies and gaming content you want,” and expanded community features. Also in store are PlayStation Cards (in $20 and $50 denominations) for the credit card-less among us. The four pillars of Sony’s plan (community, free online gaming, digital media download services, and original content) hint towards the reasons we won’t let the shiny beast get quite as dusty this year.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

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