If you’ve been hanging out for more online channels to appear on your Nintendo Wii games console, have Wii got some news for you! The Wii News Channel goes live this Saturday.

Naturally you’ll need a broadband connection, a Nintendo Wii and the currently freely downloadable Opera Web browser on the Wii to take advantage of the service, with AP reporting that they will be offering the news in a range of languages for two years, aside from the news in Japanese, which will have the news provided by “a separate agency”.

Unlike regular newspapers online, Nintendo are reported to not be selling any advertising on the service – at least, not yet. For that to work successfully, an infrastructure capable of displaying ads targeted by location and IP addresses, or the ability to display global ads would need to be in place, and while all of that technology already exists, it would simply be too much to deliver from day one.

Seemingly like the Wii’s Weather Channel, which allows you to spin an interactive globe of the planet Earth and zoom in and out at will, the news service is reported to be using a similar interface.

Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo's U.S. headquarters in Redmond told the Associated Press that: “The beauty of it is it zooms in and out of areas of the world. So if you really want to focus on regional news or national news versus international, you just blow up the map of the U.S.”

2007 should see many more channels appear for the Nintendo Wii, along with continual improvements to existing online services. The Wii proved to be a remarkably popular games console, selling out across the world and still proving difficult to find in stores today, as they are snapped up as quickly as new stocks arrive.

Nintendo are also showing up the Xbox 360 in providing the basic Internet service of a web browser. For all of Microsoft’s online prowess in offering the most robust online gaming experience and now the new video download service, along with the potential that you’ll be able to use your Xbox 360 to receive IPTV, the Xbox 360 still doesn’t offering a basic Internet browsing service. Perhaps Nintendo’s success in this area will spur Microsoft to offer one, especially as the PS3 offers web browsing, too.
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Alex Zaharov-Reutt  Browsers  Consoles  Games  Internet  Nintendo  Web  Wii