{"id":13920,"date":"2012-10-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=13920"},"modified":"2012-10-22T15:51:31","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T20:51:31","slug":"nintendo-has-its-tvii-on-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/gaming\/nintendo\/nintendo-has-its-tvii-on-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Nintendo Has Its TVii On You"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is probably not what Iggy Pop was thinking when he wrote \u201cTV Eye,\u201d but Nintendo is launching a service called TVii. Assuming, of course, that it\u2019s pronounced TV Eye and not TV-eeeh (which sounds like you\u2019re having a stroke whilst asking someone to hand you the remote.) Not knowing how to pronounce the product is possibly only one of its shortfalls.<\/p>\n
Unless you\u2019ve lived under a tech rock for the last six months, Nintendo previewed the Wii-U at E3 back in June. In mid-September, Nintendo pumped up its offering with TVii. What the gaming company is doing is building on Netflix for the Wii with other streaming media services, such as Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus, YouTube, and other internet and cable-based services, like Comcast and Verizon.<\/p>\n
All of this is controllable via the Wii-U controller, the GamePad. Already, critics<\/a> are decrying the GamePad as an unwieldy game-playing device — at around half the size of an iPad — and poorly utilized in the games available for the Wii-U. Nintendo has a long history of throwing hardware at the wall and seeing what sticks, but this is probably a lot more interesting than past experiments like the Power Glove. As a home entertainment controller, this could be a winner despite it\u2019s single-touch input, which could easily be upgraded down the line.<\/p>\n On the screen of the GamePad, you get suggestions of what to watch, group shows by categories, and a unified search engine. This search engine could possibly one of the first mainstream gateways to multi-provider internet media content that might succeed. While Nintendo has a minority share in the gaming market, this could certainly help propel the company away past turgid gaming territory of a million Mario Brothers franchises and firmly into Apple TV\u2019s territory.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n You can watch content on the GamePad that\u2019s separate from the main screen (ideal if you want to sneakily watch Community<\/em> while the rest of your household hosts a Mario Bava marathon), look up sports scores, stats and replays (for those few who enjoy the Major Conurbation Sportsball), settle arguments with IMDB information, look at episode guides on Wikipedia, or just looking for the next thing to watch. What would also be ideal is if the device came with the ability to watch additional content on the GamePad. With multi-disciplinary events, such as the Olympics, this would be the perfect platform to exploit the all possibilities that (certainly) American TV has failed to produce for its viewers.<\/p>\n