Vizio's VBR100 Blu-ray player will be a Walmart exclusive

Matt Burns

Matt is a Senior Editor at TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail side of... → Learn More

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

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Vizio just took the wraps off of its hot Internet-connected HDTVs the other day, but the company has a new Blu-ray player coming soon too. The $188 MSRP will probably get price cuts and sales to bring it down to a more “Walmart” level seeing as Blu-ray players have breached the $100 mark. But even around the starting price, this player might not disappoint.

The Vizio VBR100 is coming to market as a Profile 2.0, BD-Live player. That means it will sport an Ethernet jack for easy updates and can display all the interactive goodies that BD-Live brings. Plus, users can plug in USB flash drives to add additional content. We wish we had more deets on this spec, but expect a music player and photo viewer – DIVX playback is a possibility too. Expect the player to also the standard assortment of A/V jacks including HDMI, component, and digital audio out.

There is no reason why the player will stay at $188 for very long. The VBR100 should hit shelves just before the pre-holiday blitz, with a second, similar model launching right before Christmas.

Something tells us that we could be seeing one of Walmart’s Black Friday items: a $99 Blu-ray player. No, no, a $79 Blu-ray player. That’s more like it.

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