Sony Bravia TVs get YouTube HD

Good news if you've got a recent Sony Bravia telly squatting in your living room, as Sony's TVs get a firmware update that lets them play YouTube videos in HD.

The update brings other features designed to turn your tellybox into an adept social networking machine, including full-screen Facebook photos and video.

There's also something called Twitter Ticker (shown in the image above), a real-time Twitter feed that scrolls along the bottom of the telly, keeping you abreast of what your industry compatriots are having for dinner, and ruining your movie experience as surely as finding a nest of spiders in your popcorn.

There's an update to Sony's Shazam-style TrackID tool, that lets you identify songs you're hearing on your telly using a button on the remote. Now you can share your search results with Twitter, so if Twitter Ticker is ruining your evening, you can at least make sure nobody else on Twitter is having fun by spamming the names of songs you heard on adverts.

You can get the update on your Bravia now if it's connected to the Internet. If for whatever reason you've not connected your telly to the web, you can download the update from Sony's support site onto a USB and get it that way. Though naturally you'll need a web connection on your TV to get the features above.

The update is available for the following models (brace for a string of meaningless numbers): CX520, CX523, EX320, EX523, EX524, EX723, EX724, NX723, HX723, HX823 and HX923.

Sony recently found itself in a spot of bother in October, after it became apparent that some of its Bravia sets had a flaw that meant they could overheat and melt.

Does HD YouTube on your TV sound appealing? Or would you rather just plug your laptop into a more basic telly? Tell us in the comments section below or on our Facebook wall.