Vizio has announced at CES that they will release the Vizio VBR100 BD-Live Blu-ray Disc player for $199 this April. The player will feature 1080p video output along with support for decoding all audio formats, including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. We'll have more information about this player once the show officially kicks off tomorrow. Memorex has also announced the Memorex MVBD-2520, also a BD-Live player, for $199. It will be available early Summer, though it will not feature DTS-HD Master Audio decoding http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=2247

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Hey guys, just checking in and posting some cool Blu ray news.  This brings the lowest *retail* price of players down from  a current $250 with the magnavox player down to $200, so this will help Blu ray a bit, and imo should push the market share of Blu ray to 10% or more. 

who cares about cheap blu ray players. I want to hear about cheap blu rays.

If blu ray movies were only 15-20 dollars I would have a blu ray player already and be buying blu rays. But the extra 10-15 dollars is too mcuh per movie

Well, more players means that more units of movies will be made, which will imply that cheaper movies will come as well.


I'm busy right now, but hopefully somebody can explain how a business can reduce production costs by increasing the number of units made, and how this will spread the fixed costs over more units, thereby decreasing the total cost to make them. Cheers.

There are already Blu-Ray players in the $200 price range and I have seen them on sale for as little as $150 (I saw a door-crasher at $100, but don't think that was particularly representative) ... In the next 12 to 18 months you will probably start to see "No name" Blu-Ray players for under $100.

The thing I find interesting is how little demand there seems to be for Blu-Ray outside of the PS3 owners ... I remember seeing massive demand for DVD at a similar price range from (pretty much) everyone, and I haven't seen much excitement about Blu-Ray from people who don't own a PS3.

I think its cause people see DVD as good enough.

Heck I just bought 3 movies on DVD for $25. Prince Caspian, Jumper, and Forbidden Kingdom.

All great movies that would make good Blu Ray canidates. (Jumper being the worst of the 3 imo) But they look perfectly fine to me on DVD and can be upscalled and cost 1/3 the price.

Blockbuster is fantastic with this. I pay no additional costs to rent Blu-rays so almost everything I rent now is on Blu-ray.

ha yea I rent blu ray all the time too. Netflix is awesome in blu ray rentals. But sadly don't own a single blu ray movie

It will be interesting to see what version this player is.

Alot of the cheap models right now are older tech that supports version 1.1 and not the better 2.0 which allows for blu-ray live....

I don't own a single blu ray movie either.  Heck, I only own 1 movie and like 6 tv shows on DVD.  I've been using BB or Netflix for years.