Blu Ray players started out as simple disk players and have evolved over the last few years into sophisticated machines that are able to play a wide variety of electronic disk formats as well as stream data from the Internet.

Profile 1 Version 1.0 players – Any player released before November 1, 2007. They can play Blu Ray disks, plus standard DVDs and CDs. With very few exceptions, these players cannot be upgraded to Bonus View or BD-Live. If you are interested, the exceptions are: LG-BH100, LG-BH200, PlayStation 3, and Samsung BD-UP5000.

Profile 1 Version 1.1 or “Bonus View” players – Players that can play Blu Ray disks, standard DVDs and CDs, plus they have the ability to run two video/audio streams at the same time. Bonus View is also called Picture-in-Picture (PIP). It is used for things like director commentary while viewing a movie. These players may have an Internet connection (usually Ethernet), but it is used for firmware updates and not for accessing Internet-based content. Players in this category include 256MB of local storage for updates. The storage can be built into the player or made available through a removable memory card or USB drive.

Profile 2 or “BD-Live” players – BD-Live players have all the capability of Bonus View players plus an Internet connection for accessing bonus material available on some Blu Ray movies. Some movie studios are using this for things like online games, chat, downloadable extras (quizzes, movie trailers, etc) and access to social media sites. Players in this category have to have 1GB of local storage. Before BD-Live, when you bought a disk, that was all you got. With BD-Live, you can access additional content and activities on the internet.

BD-Live must be built into the Blu Ray disk (may not need to be said). The following list (probably not all inclusive) of studios are making Blu Ray releases with BD-Live information: 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lionsgate, Paramount and Warner. Each movie studio is putting it’s own spin on BD-Live. Disney is advertising “living menus” that change appearance according to your local time and weather, and delivery of the latest movie trailers for Disney titles.

Some BD-Live players can also stream movies from the internet. This requires a high speed Internet connection and a membership to an online video or music site. Many sites have comments indicating the streamed videos do not play with the same video and audio quality that the same movie on a Blu Ray disk does.

The review sites are already discussing next generation possibilities, including ringtone and wallpaper downloads, peer to peer interactions, live events and gaming activities.