Marketing

LG Electronics will introduce today the first networked Blu-ray Disc player with the integrated ability to access and play back Netflix instant-streaming video content.

The LG model BD300 will be only the second set-top device compatible with the Netflix instant-streaming offering. The first was a dedicated $99 Roku player introduced earlier in the year. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will also add the capability this fall.

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Microsoft dropped the price of its 20 GB Xbox 360 Pro (Premium) game console by $50 to $299.99. However, the price drop isn’t permanent as it is designed to quickly clear the inventory of these models to make room for a new 60 GB version. As soon as the 20 GB consoles are gone, you will be paying just as much as you would have before.

Weekend flyers of all major consumer electronics resellers confirmed what had been widely reported last week: Microsoft’s hard drive-equipped Xbox 360 will get cheaper: A $50 price reduction means that the device now costs $299instead of $349, which means that the console is now $100 cheaper than Sony’s 40 GB PS3 and just $50 more expensive than Nintendo’s Wii ($249). But on a closer look, it isn’t a simple price reduction of the Xbox 360, it is a marketing move.

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Google wants to make it easier for marketers to pick appropriate Web sites for their online ads with a new tool it announced Tuesday called Ad Planner.

The tool, first reported about by The New York Times on Monday, is aimed at advertising agencies’ media planners, whose job is to decide where to place their clients’ ads.

By feeding Ad Planner with their target audience’s demographic information, media planners will get a list of sites that should prove effective marketing vehicles.

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Firefox 3, the recently released open source browser from Mozilla, has claimed that over 8 million copies of the software were downloaded on Download Day. The company stated early that their goal was to surpass the initial release of Firefox 2, at 1.6 million downloads in 24 hours, and hit 5 million downloads. The goal of the marketing campaign is to set a Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in a single day.

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NEW YORK–The inaugural Internet Week New York was eight days of open bars and missed opportunities. On the red carpet at the 12th Annual Webby Awards on Tuesday night, the final event of the week-long city-sanctioned festival, I called out to Internet Week executive director David-Michel Davies and asked him what he’d do next year to change it. “We’d like to do a better job with the schedule,” he said to me after hesitating for a moment. He added a few more words about how a better calendar could help Internet Week-goers connect, before publicists snagged Davies for a string of photo ops. That was the problem with Internet Week: connecting. But it’s an issue that can’t just be solved by hiring a few extra Ruby developers for the festival calendar.

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