Samsung Pushes YouTube to Living Rooms with Blu-ray Players

Samsung has flipped a switch in some of its Blu-ray players, enabling them to tap into YouTube via a home broadband connection.

Some folks might buy into Blu-ray players to, say, view Blu-ray discs, but Samsung is going one step further by enabling YouTube on some of their Blu-ray players. The YouTube capability is a free upgrade for owners of Samsung’s BD-P1600, BD-P3600, and BD-P4600—users just press a button on their remote or navigate to YouTube via the player’s onscreen menu.

The selected Samsung Blu-ray players connect to the Internet using a wireless or wired connection to an existing home network with broadband Internet capability. Once within the YouTube interface, users can view the most popular or most highly rated videos, or search for videos using an onscreen keypad feature. The YouTube capability also lists video categories.

Adding YouTube capability may help Samsung distinguish its Blu-ray players from the increasingly-generic capabilities of Blu-ray devices as the market races for the lowest possible price points for the end-of-year holiday season. Consumer interest in Blu-ray seems to be picking up, but sales of Blu-ray gear and movies are still a fraction of what the industry was expecting years ago.