Wii News Channel offers an interactive way to track news

Redmond (WA) - The Wii News Channel launched today, allowing gamers a unique way to keep up to date on current events in an interactive way. The new channel, originally planned to be available alongside the console’s launch in November, completes the initial list of online applications for Nintendo’s new game console.

Nintendo overview of features ...

Nintendo Wii - a first look ...

Nintendo pushed back the release of the news channel to January 27, which remains the official launch date, though users can download the system update now to get full access to the new service. What the Wii does with the news channel, like every other feature with the console, is to add a new way of navigating through and managing the available content.

The news channel contains stories from around the globe, thanks to an exclusive contract with the Associated Press (AP), which has signed a two-year agreement to syndicate news content to the Wii.

There is a handful of different ways to filter the news on the Wii. From the main menu, users have a handful of categories to sort out the content to show national, international, sports, arts/entertainment, business, science/health, and technology news. After selecting a category, all of the AP’s stories for the past 24 hours are shown.

When a user selects a story, about 3/4 of the screen is taken up with a virtual newspaper that has the entire story, including any corresponding picture that is attached to the article. The other 1/4 is the virtual globe that is used in the Wii Weather Channel, zoomed in to the location of the story. For example, we selected a story about Senator Obama’s plea for universal health care. The left, main side of the screen listed the story and a file photo of Obama at a news conference. To the right, there is a picture of the globe, with the word "Washington" in big letters over the Washington, DC area.

The globe is where most of the interactive part comes into play : Users can sort out content by region. By going to the globe interface, users can scroll through the entire world, while icons pop up next to cities that show how many stories have come out of that city. While writing this story, we saw 37 stories show up in the "Providence area", which includes New York City, while "Hilo", a Hawaiian city, only showed one. Continuing West, we also found stories from Jakarta, Mumbai, and Helsinki.

Finally, the other way to view stories is the channel’s "slide show" feature, which brings up a news ticker at the bottom of the screen, while the corresponding AP images and story locations show up on the globe. By pushing the A button when a specific headline pops up, the entire story will appear. Users can also zoom in and out to increase/decrease text and picture size in an article, as well as the zoom of the globe.

More than any other feature currently on the Wii, the news channel will take advantage of WiiConnect24, a service that keeps the console always connected to the Internet to download updates automatically. This will help the new channel to remain as up-to-date as possible.

The news channel complements the Wii Weather Channel and the Wii Shop Channel to define the system’s basic online features. Notably absent, though, is the presence of online gaming. There is currently not a single Wii title that allows gamers to play against each other over the Internet, though anticipated games, like Super Smash Bros Brawl, are expected to take advantage of that. However, for now, it is something that puts Nintendo behind the market-leading Xbox 360, and even the PS3.