After an initial test roll-out last month, Netflix has brought its instant streaming service to the Wii as the last of the big three consoles to offer the service’s thousands of videos and TV shows on-demand.
In addition to its bread-and-butter DVD-by-mail rental service, Netflix allows its monthly subscribers to stream thousands of movies and TV shows instantly and has been working diligently on ways to expand that part of its market.
The company offers its own set-top box to easily bring these streaming videos to a TV set, and in 2008 it first experimented with offering the service through a video game console. The Xbox 360 was the first to offer Netflix’s streaming service directly through the console with no additional hardware required.
The PS3 was next, and now finally the Wii brings on-demand video to its users through Netflix. This is in spite of the fact that Nintendo specifically opted out of a DVD-playing functionality on the Wii and instead wanted to make it a gaming-centric device.
Netflix already has more than 12 million subscribers, but the Wii’s install base of over 28 million has the capacity to bring that number up even higher.
“Wii has created immense consumer excitement and has meaningfully altered the consumer electronics landscape. Bringing Netflix to Wii catapults us toward our goal of being ubiquitous on the connected devices most popular with consumers,” said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
Wii owners that are also Netflix subscribers can go to www.netflix.com/wii to request a special Wii disc that will enable the streaming functionality.
