Nintendo president Satoru Iwata says that plans for a video download service for the Wii may also extend to the Nintendo DS.
"If the Wii and the DS are connected, it should be possible to download video through the Wii and take it with you on the DS," Iwata told the Wall Street Journal.
"When the service begins, you'll see how we're going to do it differently in a Nintendo-like way," he added. "There are a lot of on-demand video services, so there's no reason to do the same thing, so we're going to do something different. We'll start the service in Japan, and if it does well, we'd like to take it overseas."
Last year, Nintendo
announced its partnership with Japanese ad agency Dentsu to begin a video service in Japan in 2009. It hasn't been described in further detail, but it's known the service will include both ad-supported free videos and pay-to-view content.
Although Nintendo has traditionally not pursued multimedia features with its consoles, both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 already have well-established download services for music and video content.
In Japan, however, the Wii does already have a streaming video channel operated by Fujisoft, where content can be watched for between 100 to 400 Wii Points ($1 to $4). There has been no indication that this lower-profile service will be offered in the West.
