I think you guys are missing the point here. Apple devices are designed to be able to have a single person own multiple devices while Nintendo devices are not. It would be very unusual for a house to have two Wii consoles under their roof and would be almost as unusual for a single person to own two 3DSes. Ontop of that, rightly or wrongly, nobody expects to be able to play portable games on their home consoles.

Compare that to Apple products where it wouldn't be unusual for a house to have multiple iPads and cross platform content, particularly media, is expected. If you went onto your iPhone and paid for a movie you'd expect to be able to watch it on your computer/Apple TV/iPad when you got home. If you downloaded one of those 3D videos on your 3DS you don't expect to be able to play it on your Wii (U) when you get home. So while it doesn't necessarily make sense for Nintendo to be so restrictive it would be outrageous if Apple was not.

I just hope they do it in a way DIFFERENT than the stupid 3DS to 3DS transfer... I don't want my games to lose their data!

I never lost any data...

it will use sdcard transfer,, but i dont want to do it for every game i have so im only gonna transfer the ones i want, like my collection of games i bought from the virtual console...

Hello all, we've just posted an article on this, so hopefully it'll help - http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/wii_to_wii_u_data_tr...

Now I'm more confused.

I have 6 pages worth of DL on my SD card, and only about a 1 and a half on my wii. I don't have enough room to move them all to the wii again, so I'm worried if my SD card would transfer said channel data or not.

Though I am not sure about one thing, will it transfer the data from the Save data part of the wii settings, or the Channels part?

This is the exact same thing I don't quite understand.

Do we need to get a new empty SD card and transfer everything from the Wii to it, then move that to the Wii U. Then put our old SD card back into the Wii and put as much stuff onto the Wii that we can and start the process over and do that as many times as we need to get all of our stuff to the Wii U?

So if you dont have a SD card you need to buy one to transfer from Wii to Wii U?

Argh... Wish NOA or NOJ or someone would show us a video of the transfer. I'm unsure If I need to buy a new SD card or if I can use my current one.

sigh

well i have every downloadable thing on my 2gb sd card i didnt get a crapton of stuff lol so i wonder if i can use that from my wii to the wiiu ? and just stick it in the wiiu and continue as normal?

I certainly hope it isn't like that. I always worry of data corruption.

Plus, our biggest question is not answered by nintendo: Do we need a clean SD card or can we use the one we have been using with our wiis for the past 3 years?

Well then you're probably going to be needlessly worrying about data corruption then. You have to get the data from one to the other somehow.

Is that really such a big question? You probably won't but if you do does it really matter?

definitely not

For me, yes. I prefer to use my current SD card instead of buying a brand new one.

Why do you think you would need to buy a new one?! If it needs to be a clean card, just plonk the data on your computer for later.

I'm still worried about what happens to my digital content if my Wii U console breaks (or is stolen, or I choose to sell it). Will it be like the Wii, where I simply lose all of it because it's tied to a single console, or like PS3/Xbox where I just have to log in to my account on a new console and can redownload it all?

Likely the same is it is on 3DS and Wii. System breaks? Send it to Nintendo for repair, which is a cheaper option than buying a new console anyway. Stolen? Prove it was stolen by showing Ninty a police report and they will let you download all your games onto a new console. Sell it? Include the downloaded games in the price, because you're selling those too.

I still have a feeling they're not going to actually let us transfer Wii points to the Wii U, even though they said that for Japan. In Japan they use the same cards for Wii/DSi/3DS, whereas we have different points and currency systems. Also, for the digital deluxe promo, they only told us we could use the rewards for the Wii U or 3DS eShop, but in the Nintendo Direct today they told Japan they could use the rewards on Wii U eShop/3DS eShop/Wii Shop/DSi Shop. I wonder if Japan got to transfer their DSi points to 3DS with the system transfer while the rest of us didn't — anyone know?

I'm finally getting around to transferring data from the old wii to my wii u. However I have a question that I was hoping somebody might be able to answer:
In the instructions it says that both the target and source consoles need an internet connection, does this mean they both need to maintain an internet connection throughout the whole process with the SD card or is it just referring to the need to download the transfer channel using the internet from the store for each console?

The reason I ask is because I can only have one console connected to the internet at a time. If anybody knows if I can still do the transfer or not I'd really appeciate it.

You need Wi-fi. Transferrings easy. I just read the instructions. Your game saves will still work for your games(I think, but I just started over), and you can just delete the old files(besides your saves), and redownload you games. The 'channel' data from your old console will not work anymore, so you need to redownload.