Wii Channels and niches
Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:13pm by Staff
Everyone talks about the potential of Wii Channels — what could come to be, what’s already here; how wild ideas will probably never see the light of day but sound really, really cool (Wii Cricket Channel, anyone?).
The reason I ramble today is that IGN Wii has some slick mock-ups on their site today of pipe dream future Wii channels. Examples include the Wii Stock Channel, Sports Channel and a Movie Times Channel, to name a few.
To some, these may sound like great ideas. To others, they may sound useless. But for you peeps dismissing the niche channels, hold the phone and [generic gaming-related cliche here]. As it will be the case with independent developer games on the inevitable Wii Games Channel, it will cost next to nothing for Nintendo to push niche Channels to users’ consoles. Today, you’re seeing the “hits” — those channels that a majority of people will love. Tomorrow, you will start to see the channels that theoretically only a handful of people will actually download. Because it’s all digital, there’s no harm, no foul in that at all. A channel that gets only a few downloads is no longer a “failure” as we understand that word today.
At present, everyone has access to the same Channels. It’s all very fun at first, but really it’s all very vanilla as well. News, weather, Internet. That’s so 1990’s, right? In the future, I can imagine one Wii owner having a Wii TV (going with the channel theme here…) full of Anime graphic novel channels and stock quotes, while another has chosen to stick with news and real time stock prices. The granular set up of the Wii Channel interface begs for customization — it’s just going to take some time for Nintendo and third parties to fill it up. The pics over a IGN Wii today are only a small taste of what’s to come.
February 1st, 2007 at 2:55 pm
This is a good point and I think it brings up an interesting potential of the Wii. The Wii is designed for growth. There will be new developments on the Wii that increase it’s capabilities and help broaden it’s market completely irrespective of games. Very Cool.
We will be looking to content developers outside the gaming community for the next big thing. Look at orb and their media streaming server for Wii. It’s free and it actually works. I never thought I was getting a media hub in the Wii, but sure enough, I have one, at no extra cost. Now my Divx library is at my Wii-mote caressing fingertips. Very Cool.
How many great new applications will there be for Wii? How much potential does Wii bring to the television with it’s open architecture and incredible internet buzz? Great things are bound to continue.
February 1st, 2007 at 3:26 pm
You make it sound like it doesn’t cost Nintendo anything to develop a new channel–that’s just not true. On top of paying the actual channel designers, they have to pay a licensing fee to whoever they’re getting the content from (Accuweather, for instance). It’s certainly not a no-risk proposition, and having only a couple of people download a new channel would certainly be a painful failure. As we all know, Nintendo loves their profits.
February 1st, 2007 at 3:55 pm
The Internet, Weather, News, and other new Channels aren’t going to be very useful to me unless I can actually hit the home menu during a game, go to one of the other Channels, and then go right back to my paused game. The Wii needing to apparently reboot itself when going into each channel gives me the impression that I won’t be seeing this sort of functionality on the current hardware/firmware.
February 2nd, 2007 at 12:18 am
News is actually quite cool, I can’t believe I just spent 40 mins reading news.
I hope the gme channel thing is true, so long as that’s what it takes to finally see original downloadable titles.
February 2nd, 2007 at 1:03 am
for the game channel idea id say itd be a good place to get special updates for games like wii sports where you could add a new sport for a low price.
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:25 am
All that downloadable game stuff jazz is gonna be on the Shop Channel in Wii Ware. Nintendo said this when asked about the game channel, member? No games channel, no “the Wii”, no hard drive. Live with it.
On the subject, if they open channel creation to 3rd parties, Nintendo turns the unseamless channel system into something a lot more interesting and useful.