In case you needed one more place to get Netflix videos, now you can use your Nintendo Wii game console to watch them.
It’s a little hard to get excited about this. Netflix is available on a wide variety of set-top boxes such as Roku, and it is being built into many connected TVs that are selling this year. It has been on the Xbox 360 game console’s Xbox Live service for more than a year, and it recently became available on the Sony PlayStation 3.
This is an odd place for Nintendo to be, since the company has generally looked down on Sony and Microsoft and their thinly disguised ambitions of taking over the entirety of living room entertainment. Nintendo executives have often insisted that their consoles are all about games.
By letting users watch movies, Nintendo is buying into the argument that people want more out of their game consoles as a bridge between TV and online multimedia. The Nintendo Wii can’t even play DVD movies, nor does it have storage capacity to store movies. But now Wii owners with a broadband connection and at least a $9-per-month Netflix subscription will be able to use the online service for watching Netflix movies.
Nintendo users will have to put a Netflix disc into their consoles while they watch, as is the case with Sony’s PS 3. But the Wii can’t do high-definition video. In that sense, this service seems to call out the Wii’s weaknesses. Still, there are a lot of Wii’s out there. More than 60 million have sold worldwide.
