Early adopters of Blu-Ray - paying the price?

It seems that people who went out and invested in Blu-Ray early-on are unlikely to be able to take advantage of new features being added to newly released movies. Blu-Ray players are divided in to categories (or profiles) with all players released before Nov 2007 being Profile 1.0. The latest profile, 1.1 allows new features to be accessed, one example of which is Picture-in-Picture. Anybody who owns a Sony PlayStation 3 will be aware that the recent update from Sony upgraded the Blu-Ray firmware to Profile 1.1. And that's the problem; there was no requirement for the hardware of early players to be upgradable and so they're pretty much stuck with an out-of-date Profile.


Whilst I'm sure there will soon be a great eBay market for 'chipping' or modding older players to upgrade the Profile of a player you've got to ask yourself how hard would it have been for the manufacturers to implement an upgrade process from day one. It would seem that in the rush to get their systems out to market, and thus not allow HD-DVD too great a lead, the players released weren't quite as good as they should have been and now the most dedicated base of users is to pay the price.

Now whilst I'm sure many of the early-adopters were aware that this may have become an issue when they purchased their players, it just doesn't seem right. In this day and age firmware updates are common for the gadgets we use (iPods, routers & games consoles etc...), and considering the complexity of the Blu-Ray technology, how hard would it have been to include an Ethernet port and update functionality?

The problem is only going to become more apparent when Profile 2.0 is released later in 2008. At present the only upgradable player on the market is the PlayStation 3 which seems to top may peoples lists as the best quality/value around.

You can read more in this BBC article