Samsung Pushes YouTube to Living Rooms with Blu-ray Players

By Geoff Duncan Updated June 15, 2018

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.

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Redbox DVD rentals.

After a formidable 25-year run, Netflix has announced that it will shutter its DVD-to-mail rental service, DVD Netflix, aka DVD.com. Citing the shrinking DVD business, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told shareholders on April 18 that the rental service would be shipping its last DVD on September 29, 2023.
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But now that DVD Netflix is out of the game, where can people turn to rent DVDs and Blu-rays?
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That’s where we come in with this rundown of where you can rent DVDs and Blu-rays now that Netflix is shutting down its DVD rental service. Oh, and if you need a Blu-ray player, check out our roundup of the best ones to buy.

Redbox

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NFL Sunday Ticket landing page on an iPad.

It's a new era for NFL Sunday Ticket. The method by which you can watch every out-of-market NFL game has moved from DirecTV to YouTube and YouTube TV. That's a big deal because it basically takes away every barrier to entry save one — money.

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YouTube TV details fixes for audio sync, better 1080p quality

YouTube TV on Apple TV.

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