Why so few ethernet-equipped BD players?

[DaViD Boulet]

UPDATE: I've since learned that there ARE stand-alones that provide ethernet. My bad!

Consider this the now-established topic for disucssion:

Originally Posted by Go Blu

You do have a very good point though and I do think they should take notice.

For the price of the players
there is no reason why in 2007-2008 that every player is not WiFi enabled.
It should be as standard as a DVD drive in a PC.

My original comments were as follows:

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Honestly, what gives?

The PS3 has it. EVERY HD DVD player has it. We know it's part of the 2.0 profile for BD.

Yet NO standalone BD player, at *any* price, provides it.

Let's call a spade a spade. This is rediculous. I can understand low-cost BD players omitting the connection to keep costs lower for consumers who may not care about it. But not even on high-end players where price isn't an issue?

Every time I update the firmware on my PS3 it's just a remote-click away. Same for HD DVD owners. Given all the updates necessary to play newer Java-heavy discs, it would make sense to have ethernet on BD players if for no other reason than to facilitate firmware updates.

IMO, the manufacturers (who were the problem to begin with by putting pressure on the BD group to ease spec requirements), deserve some major *****-slapping.

I'm still royally pissed about the BD group dropping required high-def decoding for the secondary video stream for PIP in profile 1.1 because the manufacturers complained that it would be "too hard" to do right now. That would have actually made BD *better* than HD DVD in regards to PIP... by giving users the abilty to swap with the PIP window to see the special effects or story-board in high-def 1080p when desired. It would also have been the perfect spring-board for real, authentic, dual-1080p channels for 3-D encoded discs with full backwards compatibility with all existing players in 2-D mode. Ok... that's a different topic. But given everything that the manufacturers have dumbed-down with BD so far, the lack of ethernet on all existing hardware is salt in the wound.

If you're going to charge 2-4 times the costs of a fully-featured HD DVD player, is ethernet too much to ask???