watching British blu-rays in the US

My wife and I just ordered the Jesus Christ Superstar Arena Tour blu-ray, and when it arrived, we were quite disappointed to discover that it doesn’t play in our blu-ray player, because it’s a region-2 blu ray.

This is particularly irritating because the website specifically claims it’s region free, as you can see on this page, selling the DVD. They’ve now changed the text on the blu-ray page to be accurate, but it used to have this same text as well.

However, dealing with a trans-atlantic company to try to get a refund seems like a big pain, so… anyone have any experience with region-free Blu-Ray players, or anything of that sort? It seems to be a gray market, but not a ridiculously sketchy one.

(Some googling seems to indicate that lots of DVD players have simple codes you can punch in on the remote to make them region free, but that seems much less true of Blu-Ray players.)
thanks

Subject to make and model, it might be easier to ‘region-free’ your player?

Worse than getting the info wrong, they don’t even know that BluRay regions are not numbers, they’re letters. It should be listed as Region B (for UK, Aus/NZ, and Africa).

Unfortunately you’re buggered. You need to either somehow jailbreak your player, or get a new one that’s region free.

I really thought region coding would be abandoned after BluRays came out. They’re no help to anybody, and just an obstacle to purchases.

They’re no help to consumers, but are to the publishers, who want people to buy things from them full price in their own region rather than get it cheaply from a region with a smaller price (or where it’s licensed to another publisher or some other bullshit).

I don’t like it either, but that’s the main reasoning.