Director of product marketing says desire to make video service "absolutely perfect" drove delay, believes impact will be minimal.
Nintendo's new Wii U console launched today in the United States without one of its more novel features: Nintendo TVii. The Mario maker told GameSpot last night at the Wii U launch event in New York City that the streaming service's delay to December was borne of a desire to make it "absolutely perfect."
"Well, I think everybody who knows Nintendo, knows that Nintendo wants everything to be the absolute best that it can," Nintendo director of product marketing Bill Trinen said. "Obviously, we wanted to have Nintendo TVii available as soon as possible. There's just a few additional tweaks that need to be made."
Trinen does not foresee the delay of Nintendo TVii negatively impacting the Wii U launch, primarily due to gamers having a number of other system features to spend time with.
"To be honest, I don't think that there's going to be a tremendous impact because the people are going to be going home tonight and they're going to be playing games; they're going to be experiencing Miiverse for the first time," Trinen said. "And that, I think, is going to give them a lot to be looking at and kind of figuring out. There's Wii U chat that's there on day one and Netflix is also going to be a part of the day-one offering. eShop, along with a ton of content, is also there day-one."
For Trinen, it all comes down to quality. He said Nintendo would rather delay TVii than ship a service that gamers would not be satisfied with.
"So it's really more about just making sure that that Nintendo TVii service is absolutely perfect when it launches," he said. "Because we think it's probably more important that people sit down with it the first time and have a really great experience and want to keep using it than necessarily trying to push it out too soon and have people dissatisfied with it."
Nintendo TVii works with cable and satellite providers, as well as streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Players must hold a subscription to these services to use Nintendo TVii, but no additional fees or equipment are required.
TVii viewers can use the GamePad to interact with others through commenting on specific live television moments and sharing those comments with others through Miiverse, Facebook, and Twitter.
GameSpot's full interview with Trinen will run tomorrow.
Eddie Makuch (Mack-ooh) is a News Editor at GameSpot. He works out of the company's Boston office in Somerville, Mass., and loves extra chunky peanut butter.
Nintendo is probably finding out like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google, Apple, and so many others that have tried that securing deals with most of Hollywood / the MPAA is close to impossible. I'll be really impressed if Nintendo can crack the nut of universal video entertainment on their first attempt.
1 Like Good thing that I do not get stuff at launch :) Every thing has problems at launch so I will just get it when the kinks are fixed. :D
6 Like The delay is only till next month. Nothing to fret about at all. I'm completely in love with the system as it is.
5 Like Since when do people watch TV on a freakin console. Isn't that what cable is for? Stupid.
Well, Nintendo is going to be MASSIVELY busy, hearing about all the launch issues. I think they should focus on that more.
1 Like @nintendoboy16 What Launch Issues? I have mine and everything works great. Miiverse was down for a bit but was up and running in no time. System updates are too long but really who cares. No issues here.
@jonzilla_basic @nintendoboy16 the issues is with people turning off the system while it was updating and it breaks it of course
@shadowhunter0 @nintendoboy16 Right which is common sense to anyone....Well, you would think anyways.
1 Like @nintendoboy16 every console has lauch issues. you just need to wait for them to iron out the kinks.
1 Like @craigprime well it is Nintendo and not M$ so it probably will be free if it was M$ they would make you have a xbl gold account in order to use it
1 Like It's not a feature I anticipate so I'm not to worried. My Wii U gets turned on for the Marios and Zeldas and occasional 3rd party exclusives. The memory is prime real estate with only 32gigs and I don't plan on dangling dongles from the Wii U for years. I'm sure this app will just suck up memory that I have reserved for saves.
2 Like All I'm happy about is that unlike MS that charges £40 / $60 dollars a year to play on line with friends. Wii U's on-line function is as they say ... free ;-)
I did want to celebrate my Wii U purchase by recording an episode of The Walking Dead, but oh well, I'll be using it for many other things ^_^
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