Sony BDPS3700 Streaming Blu-Ray Disc Player with Wi-Fi (Black)

Ive owned two of these for the past 6 years. As a Blu-ray / DVD player and nothing else, its great. Does exactly what it needs to do. However, if youre looking for something that streams Netflix, HULU, YouTube, and anything else on the Internet, the technology behind it is outdated and appears to be insufficient. I noticed that the system was constantly freezing, ads lag, shows stay in loading screens forever while the sound is going but not the picture. I figured the hardware was burned out and it was just a matter of replacing it with a new one. Well, the brand new one had the same exact issues right out of the box. No amount of hard-resetting is going to fix the fact that the product just cant perform streaming services with any modicum of effectiveness anymore. I then realized that the issues with the old one started acting up right around the time Netflix made updates to their User Interfacing system (which is intense on the system because now it actively does live trailer streams while youre still deciding if youre going to watch the show or not). Eventually the other streaming sites started having huge performance issues for the exact same reasons. Sites are updating their coding and UI’s and this player is just not built to handle it anymore. Dont let the cheap price tags entice you, this product straight-up wont be able to perform.

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I bought this to replace a 2011 vintage Sony BDP-BX58 streaming Blue-ray/DVD player that had suddenly developed network authentication issues on Netflix & Amazon streaming. I was expecting some improvement in technology & usability with the passing of 6 years; wow, what a disappointment. The box is smaller, but instead of the player plugging directly into the wall you now have to deal with a "wall wart" transformer and very flimsy power cord. Thats a real pain on an already crowded media center and power strip. It plays Blu-ray and DVD media reasonably well, one downside here is that the front display of where you are in a video (chapter & time elapsed/remaining) is missing, yes, you can pick up the remote and pres display and have it cover about 1/3 of the display to show that information, but to me this is not progress, it is bad design. It played my DVD-R and CD-R media reasonably well. CD-R full of photos play as a slide show or you can browse to a particular photo and display just that one. The browsing was noticeably slower than my old player, and that by no means was a high-end player. Playing media off USB is also a step backwards; instead of just being able to browse a directory/folder and selecting a file and having it play that audio/video or display the photo, you now have to tell the browser what directory/folder AND the type of media you want to see. You end up going through each folder 3 times trying to find files you want to view/play. Good grief, my JVC DVD player from 2004 had better software than this! Another annoyance is that volume levels on streaming, discs and USB are all different. So when you pop aDVD in you may need to turn the volume way up, then later you switch to streaming and you find the volume is blasting. Media played off USB is somewhere in the middle. For what its worth my old Sony player had the same problem, I guess its a "feature". Streaming is the biggest disappointment with this player. Thats a problem as 75% of our video watching these days is streaming on Amazon or Netflix as well as the occasional VuDu. Biggest problem is streaming video quality: it tiles (pixelated video) during complex or scenes with lots of motion. At first I thought it was the particular episodes I was watching, but I ruled that out by watching ones I had watched on the old player without problem, now they had tiling. I watched the episodes on my laptop over the same WiFi and had no issues. The second biggest problem is navigation. Instead of the old and easy to navigate grid or matrix, my Netflix and Amazon are now a huge horizontal scrolling list. If you like wearing out the buttons on your remote this is a great feature, but to me a huge step backwards in usability. Another annoyance for serials is the indicator that you have watched an episode, which used to be unmistakably a subdued gray, is now impossible to detect. I guess they figured they dont need that as they auto-play the next episode. I dont know if that does that on pay per-episode programming, but if it does watch out. Another annoyance with streaming is the app updates. When an app updates the icon in your "My Apps" section of the app selector no longer works. You have to delete it from My Apps, then go back to the master app list, find it and add it back to My Apps. Doesnt happen often, but again, older streaming players didnt have this issue. This is sloppy programming. Summary: this is actually a couple of steps back from the entry level Sony Blu-ray/streaming player I purchased 6 years ago. I didnt expect that! In fact its streaming usability is below that of my first generation Roku from 2009. Its selection of streaming apps is rather limited and to make matters worse the streaming quality is not the best. The real killer for me is the searching for content within Amazon Video and Netflix. Im frustrated everytime I use the streaming. As a basic Blu-ray/DVD player it - it works just fine.

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Our family room is our movie/TV room, but our television, a beautiful plasma LG model, isnt "smart." We need a Blu-ray player, not only for playing DVDs and high-def discs but also for accessing the internet and streaming programs on Netflix. So we bought this Sony model three months ago, and for the first month, it worked great. But then, mysteriously, it began freezing on us--either while "booting up" and connecting or while streaming a program--and when that happens (and it has happened literally dozens of times in the past two months), game over. Not only do we typically have to unplug the unit (remember, its frozen, locked up tighter n Fort Knox), when we plug it in again we have to both reenter the network password AND re-sign in to our Netflix account. And then we keep our fingers crossed that it will remain connected long enough to stream an entire movie or TV program. Last evening, we were watching the final episode of a thrilling show when, with seven minutes to go, the screen went black. Yep. The Sony froze again. I told my wife, "This is it. Weve suffered long enough!" (Admittedly, it is a first-world problem, and in the ultimate scheme of things, a mere blip on the screen of lifes "sufferings." But nonetheless, a needless aggravation.) "We are sending this back," I said. Unfortunately, we were too late as the "return window" closed 30 days after purchase--during which time, of course, the unit worked just fine. So now, apart from unplugging this piece of junk for the last time and slam-dunking it into the garbage bin, I was left with one recourse: writing a product review for Amazon. Ive given it two stars because it plays discs nicely and without faltering--at least so far. Spare yourself the headache and skip this model, especially if you intend to use it to stream programs.

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