SONY HAS UNVEILED a new line of Bravia XR television sets that (for a limited time) will be preloaded with its new Bravia Core streaming service as its virtual CES 2021 presentation.
It provides access to premium and classic films from Sony Pictures Entertainment and the company says the Bravia Core service is the first in the industry to feature “Pure Stream” technology, achieving “near lossless UHD BD equivalent quality with streaming up to 80 Mbps.”
The rather sizable catch is users will need a minimum internet speed of 115 Mbps to access the highest video quality setting. If you can, that should rival the picture quality of a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc player. And the service is only available (at least for now) on Sony’s new Z9J, A90J, A80J, X95J and X90J TVs also announced at CES.
Owners of the 8K Z9J and 4k A90J have access to the service for 24 months and receive 10 credits to exchange for 10 movies with over 300 films to choose from. Owners of the other three XR models (80J, X95J and X90J) get five credits and 12 months to stream any purchased movies as many times as they like.
Some may recall Sony previously marketed something similar with its Sony 4k Ultra movie store which it ultimately abandoned in 2019.
For content, the other major change coming to Sony TVs is the transition from Android TV to its successor Google TV, first introduced last year on the new Chromecast with Google TV. Users can now search for shows, get recommendations, and control TV functions with voice commands.
In other streaming news at CES, LG introduced its webOS 6.0. It comes with an upgraded version of its ThinQ AI and supports new voice commands for Alexa and Google Assistant. The new Magic Remote has hot keys for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney +. It will also have an NFC-powered function called Magic Tap that enables users to share content between their NFC-enabled smartphones and LG TV.
Samsung also has announced that U.S. viewers can now access more than 160 free channels through Samsung TV Plus.
