Video downloads for Nintendo consoles

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Video downloads for Nintendo consoles

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, has just unveiled plans for a video-on-demand service on DS and Wii.

Of course, such a move is not exactly unexpected when Nintendo’s rivals have been making such big strides in the video arena recently. Nintendo stands a slightly better than decent chance of seizing the lion’s share of the console video download market from the outset too, what with such gargantuan audiences for both its home and portable consoles. Put another way Nintendo certainly has the numbers to attract the very biggest blockbusters.

From what we understand the Wii will be the main hub of the new service, with DS owners then transferring video content to their handhelds for viewing on the hoof, so to speak. We’re more intrigued by Mr Iwata’s comments to The Wall Street Journal, though:

“There are a lot of on-demand video services, so there’s no reason to do the same thing, so we’re going to do something different.”

What’s he talking about? We’ve no idea but we can’t wait to find out - a Japanese trial of the service is touted for later this year. Meantime we’re thinking a simple software update allowing for a better display from the Wii, movies stored on SD cards, WiiMote menu navigation and the whole thing looking a bit rubbish on DS. But you never know. Much more soon, we hope…