David Emery OnlineAs Seen On TV
3 January 2007
Over the Christmas holiday one of the things I found time to squeeze in was a quick go on my brother’s Nintendo Wii. It’s a truly amazing bit of kit – when Mario Galaxy comes out I think I’ll cave in and get one; it really is amazing how much more intuitive the controller is compared to traditional input devices are – never mind game controllers but mice and keyboards as well.
But that’s not the important thing.
The Wii – like the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 – is designed to be always connected to the internet. For a start this instantly enables another rival platform to iTunes for video delivery – Nintendo already have a online integrated store and it would be be easy for them to sell video content (although it would have to be streaming, as the Wii has no HD). A synergy with someone like Cartoon Network or Disney could work really well here; playing to Nintendo’s younger market – which they have sewn up.
That’s still not the important thing.
What’s most important is the free demo of Opera that they’ve released for download over Christmas.
Actually, scratch that.
The most important thing is that Opera and Nintendo have finally managed to create a browser that actually works on a TV. Due to the Wii remote, browsing around pages is easy – just point and click – and entering address’ is surprising easy using the onscreen keyboard. Not only does it work, but it works well – well enough that I can see people actually want to use it.
Which changes the whole game.
YouTube, for example, already works quite nicely on the Wii but it could be so much better with a UI optimised for TV resolution – to bump up the font sizes, so it’s readable across the room, and try and get rid of scrolling; that kind of thing. And of course, the same is true of pretty much every web site – they all “work” on the Wii, but they could work much better. Not only that, but the Playstation 3 comes with a browser built in.
If you’re designing and developing websites – especially media rich ones – and you want to be ahead of the curve you better start thinking about the SofaWeb now, before it’s too late.