Plans for Wii Netflix movies on demand firm

Mike Bantick
Monday, 11 January 2010 04:39

Your IT - Entertainment

Face it kids, streaming movies on demand are the future, and actually the now on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 amongst other home entertainment devices.  But getting them through the most prevalent current game console, the Nintendo Wii, may be getting closer to reality.  Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says the chances are ‘Excellent’.

Back in September last year, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix the US based mail-order and online streaming movie rental company spoke about getting their system on more platforms than the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Hastings told Reuters that after the Xbox 360 deal “..eventually we want to be on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs. So we are working in parallel with all of those efforts.”

Hastings went on to target iPhone, Youtube, Apple and Hulu amongst other video delivery infrastructure as potential outlets for the Netflix movie on demand service.

Now firmly entrenched on the Xbox 360 (in the U.S. at least) and to a lesser extent on the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii owners wondered if they might be blessed with a similar streaming service on their lower powered but more popular device.

At the Consumer Electronic Show this week in Las Vegas, Hastings sat down with Peter Kafka of All Things Digital for a bit of a chat about Netflix future directions.

At one point Kafka asked what the chances of launching a similar movie-on-demand service on a Nintendo platform were.  Hastings responded that those chances were “Excellent” and that such a service “should work out over time”.

Given the use of the term ‘Nintendo’ rather that specifically singling out the Wii, much of the future of a movie-on-demand service from Netflix is speculative. 

It could well be that Netflix are eying off a possible second generation Wii – the rumoured Wii HD – as a viable platform to power a competitive service against Microsoft, Sony and others.

Given that the Wii commands close to 50 percent of the console market though, if Hastings can conjure up even a SD DVD quality service for platform, it could prove lucrative.  That is of course if a significant proportion of the Wii’s are indeed internet connected, online gaming has not been a big part of the Wii experience.