Denver (CO) – LG has announced a new Blu-ray player that can stream Netflix videos.  The BD300 will be available this fall for $400 and will have the standard Blu-ray features like 1080p resolution and five channel uncompressed audio playback.  The player also has a USB port that plays music, pictures and videos from common handheld devices.  Standard definition DVDs can also be played and the BD300 will upsample the video to 1080p resolutions.  But perhaps the most interesting feature is the Netflix streaming, but sadly the video and audio quality will be extremely limited.

According to LG, the Netflix streaming will make approximately 12000 movies and videos available to home viewers.  Streams will only be available in standard definition and the bitrate quality will vary according to the user’s bandwidth with streaming speeds ranging from 500 kbps to 2.2 megabits per second on the high side.  Streamed videos will have thumbnail previews, but sadly they’ll only have ho-hum two-channel stereo audio.  Furthermore, these videos won’t be upsampled to HD resolutions.

The standard definition video streaming should be blamed on LG, however, as Netflix is the one providing the service.   So far it hasn’t hinted at when they will provide HD streaming, but presumably this won’t occur anytime soon is it might cannibalize the company’s popular physical disc rental service.