I have been thinking about this for awhile now. Will the Wii u have some sort of video player like the Xbox 360 one? You know like you can play .avi and .wmv files on the wii u.

Probably the Wii U's "photo channel." There's no telling which specific file formats will work until the system is out, most likely. It would be nice if the Wii U had an actual media player, though. But considering the lack of a media player channel on either the Wii or 3DS, it doesn't look likely.

Hang on, why is this an issue? If the Wii U has a photo channel, you can view pretty much any footage recorded via digital camera and we already know it is going to have YouTube compatibility (if the E3 video was being honest) and Netfilx. What else do you need? I'm not going to start up my Wii U to play music or watch a movie. That's why I have an MP3 player and Blu-ray player.

well i have a bunch of digital movies that i would like to watch on a big screen. like the what the xbox has. maybe they will add it in later or something.

I use my PS3 all the time as a media player. The Wii U seems like it'd be the perfect fit for all your digital media with its tablet controller and all, but nintendo seems to hate using their consoles for anything but video games.

I really don't care about the wii u doing anything more than games. The Apple TV does media better than anything Nintendo could come up with.

You forgot to mention the PS2.
Seriously, Nintendo attempting this would just be a waste of money in my eyes. People at the very least have DVD players, and most have more than that in this day and age. I just can't see myself or others using it for anything outside of games.

Moomoo what I meant was, even in a hypothetical world where Nintendo makes an awesome video player that streams to the tablet as well, it would still be behind the Apple TV because Nintendo doesn't have billions of GB of iTunes media and the Wii U tablet is inferior to the retina display of the new iPad.

It goes beyond just DVD playback - Nintendo quite genuinely lacks the ability to even complete with Apple (or Sony or Microsoft for that matter) in terms of entertainment content.

Even for people who don't have an Apple TV thingo and just want to play back their own media and maybe stuff from youtube you kinda wonder what the point would be. I'd assume that I'm probably a fairly mainstream consumer in terms of what hardware I have already and I can do all those things already. I have a NAS in the back room (which is prob atypical but shouldn't be!) and on the main TV I have the TV and Blu-Ray player both capable of playing back a small range of video formats as well as music and photos. I can also move throughout the house and play more or less the same handful of video formats on my iPad via the NAS.

So I struggle to see what I'd gain from the Wii U being able to duplicate that functionality.....

Hi guys!!! Im from Argentina (obviously wii U never will be released here officially) so i must ask here about the console before import the Wii U from usa..

. Do you know if officially will play mp3 files or mp4, from usb or flash drive???

I need to know it, because im thinking about selling my ps3 (wich i dont use just to listen music or play videos) and i MUST KNOW IF WIIU will play movies (I dont want to buy an Apple Tv, or aditionally devices...) Thanks!!!

It can stream mp4 files through its browser, however i'm not sure you can access those files via USB. In addition, it doesn't seem to have the ability to stream MKV or avi files through its browser. Does anyone know if it's DLNA compliant, if so how do you get it to recognize your server?

Hmmm....?....!

@everyone Unlike Microsoft or Sony, Nintendo only produces video games. Microsoft and Sony have other divisions in which they release CD players, MP3 players, TVs etc, so of course their consoles are bound to have built in Blu Ray Players or streaming services.

For students or people who don't have loads of gadgets I can see the appeal of a media player on Wii U. Given the remote functionality provided by the Gamepad and their past history of creating media players for the DSi I cannot see why they wouldn't.

I can see this working well on the Wii U, given the proficiencies of the GamePad. It'd be easy to arrange a sort of quick-access layout on the controller (thumbnails etc.) and the option to stream media to view/watch onto the GamePad would be a given ingenuity (like Apple Airplay).

I think Nintendo TVii's a marvellous example of why Nintendo should dip more into providing entertainment content.

One of the reasons why the WiiU doesn't have apps like a video player is because of licensing costs, and adding those costs onto the current price of the consoles for something not everyone would use would put some people off. However, much like having the option for an external HDD, it would be nice if Nintendo gave us the option to have such features if we wanted them by purchasing them on the eShop. I remember when Nintendo was developing a dongle for the Wii that allowed DVD playback, but that fell to the wayside.

Maybe in the future