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A lower priced Blu-ray player is coming this November from Sherwood America for under $300.  Expect the usual BD features like 1080p video, upscales DVDs, and supports BD Profile 1.1.  With the holidays coming, expect more news like this.

I have never heard of this particular company, so I did some digging.  Don’t expect any exotic styling here.  Their other devices feature pretty conservative design.  Where can you expect to find this player?  We don’t know yet, but when we do, we’ll let you know.  More after the break.

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I just received an e-mail from Netflix saying that there will be an increase in the subscription fee for unlimited access to Blu-ray movies.  The increase is a whopping $1.  Assuming they aren’t singling me out, this should effect plenty of Netflix subscribers.

This new fee will start on November 5th, 2008.  If you don’t want to get hit with the fee, you can turn off access to Blu-ray movies by going into your account and changing your settings.  This is far from the end of the world.  It is only a dollar more a month to get higher quality videos from Netflix.  More details as they come.

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Imation has announced that it will be bringing the fastest recordable Blu-Ray discs to the U.S. market under the TDK name.  The recording speed of these BD-Rs is 6X.  That might not sound very fast considering DVD and CD recording rates are in the double digits, but, keep in mind that Blu-Ray stores much more data than DVDs.  These 25GB per layer (up to 50GB for dual-layer) discs can transfer data at an awesome 216 Mbps.  That means it can transfer 25GB of data in 17 minutes.  That rate is equal to 20X DVD-Rs, but 25GB would require 6 DVDs as opposed to one BD.  These BD-Rs will be available this October; one BD-R will cost $13.99 and one BD-R dual layer will cost $32.99.

This news comes just three months after a Reuters report saying that the adoption rate of Blu-Ray is faster than the DVD adoption rate at the same time of its life cycle.  That can be pretty surprising considering an ABI survey from April 2008 showed most people aren’t buying Blu-Ray players just yet.  Although, with the rise of the HDTV, more Blu-Ray players would make sense.  Blu-Ray has a larger capacity that can hold uncompressed High-Definition video and completely uncompressed sound.  It is currently the best physical format for sound and video.

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