Nintendo's New York press conference for Wii U didn't just focus on games, but unveiled an ambitious new application for North America called TVii. This application will use the GamePad in particular to allow a range of new interactions with TV content, and seems like a big step forward in Nintendo's efforts to take over the living room.
The concept of TVii is to pull together varied content from different providers (such as Netflix and other services to which you subscribe) and improve how you interact with it. For example, it'll include an interactive TV guide that allows you to recommend shows to your friends through an online service; this looks set to include the surprising move to allow connections to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Another neat feature shown was interactive stat tracking when watching, for example, American Football, with a demo showing the GamePad screen displaying player positions on the field.
With social networks, collection of content into one interface and a concept of online sharing, this was possibly the most ambitious Wii U software revealed. The fact that it'll be free with every system — no monthly fee — is also significant. It's currently only confirmed for North America, but hopefully equivalent services will eventually arrive in Europe and elsewhere.
While Nintendo of America's Wii U release date reveal featured a substantial section outlining TVii, the app that promises to give intuitive extra functionality to existing TV services, the equivalent European and Japanese Nintendo Direct broadcasts focused almost exclusively on games. The simple reason for this was that TVii was only announced for North America, leaving plenty of potential Wii U owners elsewhere wondering whether they'd have the opportunity to use a similar service.
As a flagship part of Wii U's non-gaming functionality, it seems that Nintendo's aware that a similar service should probably be made available elsewhere. As part of a briefing no doubt designed to appease investors, Satoru Iwata gave a strong indication that an equivalent TVii service may well be on the way to Europe — hopefully including other PAL regions too — and Japan in the future.
We are currently considering offering Nintendo TVii in Japan and Europe by taking into account how people watch television in each region, and I believe I will be able to share more details in the not-so-distant future.
In this sense, many partners, including third-party publishers and non-gaming partners, as exemplified by VOD service providers, are seeing a lot of potential in Wii U, especially because it can also be used freely in the living room even if the TV is in use, and there are many possibilities, such as a shopping service or some other service that uses the internet.
With tough competition from other games systems, as well as a variety of other devices, it seems important for Wii U to offer as many different services as possible. For those of us that simply want to play games, Wii U looks promising, but TV and internet services won't do its chances any harm.
Last week we discovered that the Wii U will need to be updated with a patch on day-one of launch to enable you to use features such as Miiverse, Wii U Chat and the eShop.
North America was also told that TVii, the service that allows users to navigate through their online video subscriptions more easily, will also be available on day-one by downloading an update – however it has now been revealed that this is not the case as the patch is being pushed back to December.
It’s the same for the other video content apps such as Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, and Netflix. Although we know TVii will be available at some point in December, Nintendo are being more sketchy with their individual release dates simply saying they will arrive “in the coming weeks”.
Rest assured that it is only the multimedia applications that won’t be available so features such as Miiverse, Wii U Chat, eShop and Wii backward compatibility will all be available from the get-go by downloading the available patch.
Forums
Topic: Wii tv?
Posts 1 to 4 of 4
This topic has been archived, no further posts can be added.