Nintendo TVii

» see nintendo.com/wiiu/tvii as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

by the time nintendo tvii would have launched in europe, it never launched in europe. nintendo cancelled the european version on february 14 2015. honestly, six months later they pulled the plug on the north american version too. the japanese version held on alone until november 7 2017.

tvii was a wii u service built by nintendo with a partner called i.tv. it turned the gamepad screen into a tv-discovery surface. you could see what was on cable, what was streaming, and tap a show to get cast info pulled from imdb and wikipedia and rotten tomatoes. it could control your set-top box. it was free, baked into the wii u home menu, and one of the launch features nintendo used to argue the second screen was worth carrying.

the japanese version was different from the start. it never connected to streaming services because hulu plus and amazon video and netflix were either weak or not negotiated in japan. it leaned harder on cable guide data and recorded-tv integration. in those days. that is part of why it outlived the north american version by two years, the japanese version did less and depended on fewer partners.

i was 28 in 2012, finishing grad work and not a wii u buyer. the wii u itself never had a turkish launch in the way that mattered. the console was importable through grey-market sellers in istanbul but tvii was geo-locked to north america and japan, so the part of the wii u that justified the gamepad was the part that would not function on a console shipped to ankara. by the time i ever held a wii u it was already a museum object.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch press cycle was kind. tech bloggers loved the gamepad-as-remote demo at e3 2012. you could be watching a hockey game on the tv and the gamepad would show you the play-by-play, the box score, what the social-media reaction was. nintendo had clearly thought about it. the partnership with i.tv supplied the back-end and the regional cable-guide data that nintendo did not want to negotiate itself.

the problem was that the wii u was a slow seller from november 2012 onward. by mid-2013 the install base was a fraction of what nintendo had projected. that meant tvii was a feature on a console fewer households owned, and the gamepad-as-remote pitch never reached the volume where it could become a habit for many users.

~ the postmortem ~

nintendo announced the european cancellation on february 14 2015 with a brief statement that did not promise a replacement. the north american shutdown notice came in july 2015 and the service went dark on august 11. to be honest, the company cited the cost of maintaining the data licensing as one factor. the japanese version stayed up because the partner agreements there were structured differently and the cost of running it was lower. when those expired in november 2017 nintendo closed the japanese tvii too.

~ what got buried with it ~

tivo, which the project had hinted at integrating with from the start, never actually shipped support. the second-screen-as-tv-remote idea got recycled into smart-tv apps and phone-based remote controls that came with later cable boxes. nintendo never made another tv-discovery service. the wii u was the last nintendo console to bet on a screen-in-your-hand-while-tv-is-on layout. the switch hid the second screen by making it the only screen.

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