Panasonic is making a lot of people happy today. This morning it gave all of its Viera Cast Blu-ray players support for Amazon’s Video On Demand service. The feature lets the company’s more advanced disc readers from 2009, stream purchases and rentals directly from the reader without needing storage for a complete copy. You don’t need a matching Panasonic TV and it supports HD with a fast connection.

An update to add Amazon’s service should be available for free today and will go well with existing support for Picasa photos, YouTube videos and the other services already available on the Blu-ray players.

Now that the high-def format war has come to an end Sony is rolling out a couple of new Blu-ray players equipped with the latest and greatest features. The BDP-S550 and BDP-S350 look virtually identical but differ only in some of the internal extras.

Both players come with picture-in-picture which Sony is calling “BonusView”, and have BD-Live through an Ethernet port allowing the players to get firmware updates and interactive content through the intertubes. The BDP-S350 is BD-Live “ready” while the BDP-S550 ships with the feature already capable. One of the other few differences between the two is that the BDP-S550 comes with 1GB of internal storage while the other doesn’t, but both have a USB connection for additional external storage.