BBC iPlayer available on Wii

Apr
10th

April 10th, 2008 at 09:00 by Neil Armstrong

The BBC announced yesterday on their Internet blog that the BBC iPlayer will soon be available on the Nintendo Wii.

We’re big Wii fans here and this is yet another reason to buy one

Thinkbroadband make some very interesting observations about image quality and screen size.

“The Nintendo Wii is different compared to iPhone, Mac, and PC for viewing content as it is very likely to be connected to a big screen TV in the lounge, so it will be interesting to see what the public reaction is to the quality of the video when viewed on a 26″, 32″ or even 40″ screen sizes. The quality may well be preferable to that of a VHS recording of the show and without the need to remember to program the video recorder or PVR people will be able to see stuff that they would have otherwise missed. Remember it is of course possible to connect your Mac or PC to many modern TV’s as most modern video cards support a DVI output which with the correct cable can be connected to a HDMI socket. The older standard was a S-Video output but this generally gives a much lower quality image than DVI.”

We’ll keep a close eye on our network performance graphs and will let you know if the availability of the iPlayer on Wii means iPlayer usage increases even faster.

Bookmark to:

The iPlayer is live and it is good
iPlayer Part 2: The Wrath of Khan?
Community Site Updates
How to install the BBC iPlayer on Windows Vista

This entry was posted by Neil Armstrong on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is tagged with BBC, iPlayer, PVR, Wii and is posted in the category Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 comments on "BBC iPlayer available on Wii"

nerd. said:
April 10th, 2008

It’s going to be a bandwidth eater if it’s only streaming though (and without a hard drive I don’t see how it could be much else) since we won’t be able to schedule downloads overnight. Now if they turned the Wii into a DLNA receiver capable of streaming iPlayer content from a PC - THAT would be incredible.

slockley said:
April 10th, 2008

I suddenly would like to invest in a Wii

thecowenfamily said:
April 10th, 2008

Just imagine when we have streaming video forums;)

phil said:
April 10th, 2008

It’s arrived!

“If you have a Nintendo Wii, it’s already connected to your TV, and now you can play BBC iPlayer programmes directly on your Wii.”

Any experience yet? How’s the quality?

_CN_ said:
April 12th, 2008

The Wii version has been made to work on the PS3 - http://www.ps3iplayer.com

_CN_ said:
April 12th, 2008

The version for the Wii will use an extra 135MB for an hour viewing compared to the PC version

Jamie_Hardy said:
April 15th, 2008

The hacker that managed to port the BBC’s iPlayer onto the PS3 console has been unofficially offered a job by the BBC’s Head of Digital Media Technology, Future Media & Technology. http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/04/15/bbc_offers_job_to_ps3_iplayer.html