Sony BDP-S580 Blu-ray Disc Player (Black)

Sony BDP-S580 Blu-ray Disc Player (Black)
I bought this unit specifically for watching streaming movies and TV through Netflix and Hulu, and sometimes music through Pandora. My first disappointment occurred almost immediately when it wouldn't play Netflix at all. It wouldn't even let me sign in to my Netflix account. It kept saying I needed a firmware upgrade to use Netflix. So I tried to use the built-in firmware upgrade feature to do that, but guess what, that didn't work either, even after I had gotten the wired networking working. Some networking features worked, but not all, and not Netflix nor firmware upgrades. I finally figured out I needed to go to the Sony website and download the firmware upgrade files from there. Fortunately, their website clearly explained the manual firmware upgrade process. I was finally able to upgrade the firmware and get Netflix working. That was when I discovered that the streaming downloads take forever to start downloading (well actually about 1-2 minutes). Once the streaming movie gets started, it works okay from there, on my 30 Mbps cable Internet connection. 

Next I tried Hulu. That was much worse. Because Hulu requires that you watch a commercial every 6 minutes, now the 1-2 minute network wait occurs EVERY 6 MINUTES instead of just at the start like with Netflix. These are the same shows that play instantly on my computer using the same wired ethernet connection. So every 6 minutes, I wait while this player makes the connection to the new source and waits 1-2 minutes unit the stream gets going. Hulu also has more menu layers to get through to select your show, so even selecting a show takes up to 5 minutes with this player. On the good side, the buffering feature works very well so if you want to see a scene over again, rewinding is fast and simple and doesn't require re-buffering the stream from the Internet. That is the only thing that works better than my old LG player. 

Another problem I discovered is that EVERY TIME I turn the player on I have to re-setup the network connections... even for a wired connection. It keeps forgetting what the network setup is supposed to be even though I save the settings every time. 

Summary: 
If you're looking for a streaming player and don't NEED Hulu, I would look elsewhere as lots of faster players will do Netflix just fine. If you need Netflix and Hulu and Pandora and Slacker and others, then these Sony players may be your only choice for now, but I would wait because there are likely to be better units coming out before long. Even though I like all of the above-mentioned services, I may return this player as my patience wears thinner. 

I haven't trying playing a blu-ray disc yet, but others have commented that that works well, so I will take their word for it. 

UPDATE 2011-04-04: After a few days of this player not working well, I called Sony tech support and they had me change the primary DNS setting (in Internet Setup) to 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS server), and that fixed nearly everything. The long delays in streaming content are now completely gone. Sometimes I still have to remind the player to use wired connection on powerup, but once I do that it works quite well. Based on this performance I changed my initial 3 stars to 5 stars because this player has more streaming Internet features and content than most other players.