Nintendo Video

~ the last words ~

Nintendo Video lived its whole life inside a handheld I never bought, which is the ordinary kind of distance. The less ordinary part is what the thing actually was. On 13 july 2011 it went out free to every 3DS outside North America, with the American release following on 21 july, and from that day forward the console did the picking.

It did not stream. SpotPass, the background connection a 3DS opened by itself whenever it recognized a Wi-Fi network, pulled video files down onto the SD card while the machine sat closed in a bag. You got four at a time. You could not request a fifth or refuse any of the four, and each file carried an expiry date, so the ones you had were deleted to clear space for whatever came next.

What arrived was short-form comedy and animation. CollegeHumor and Aardman were the names carrying it, with Mondo Media and the Channel Frederator Network filling in around them. A good amount of it was shot in stereoscopic 3D, because the 3DS was the only screen in the world that could show that without glasses and Nintendo wanted a reason to keep pointing at it.

I came up on a line where you fetched things. Dial-up in Turkey meant deciding what was worth the minutes before you started, and then the file either finished or it did not. Nintendo Video assumed the reverse, that the good outcome is a device quietly filling itself with things you never asked for. Every recommendation feed since has agreed with it. The difference is that this one also had permission to take them back.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Free was the whole pitch, and in 2011 that was not nothing. The 3DS had launched in february of that year into a rough reception and needed a price cut by august, and Nintendo was hunting for arguments in favor of the hardware that did not depend on the game lineup showing up on schedule. A video channel that cost nothing and refilled itself was one of them.

It worked in a narrow way. People watched the shorts, partly because they were sitting there and partly because 3D on a screen with no glasses in front of it was still a novelty. What it never turned into was a habit, because a habit needs you to be able to go back to something, and going back was the one thing the app had been built to prevent.

~ what got buried with it ~

The app closed on 31 march 2014 everywhere except North America, where it ran until 29 june 2015. Much of the catalog moved into a Nintendo Video section of the eShop and stayed downloadable, which is why roughly 164 videos were still sitting there in 2019. Then the 3DS eShop closed on 27 march 2023 and that route closed with it.

The pieces made in stereoscopic 3D are the real loss. When those shorts turned up later on the web or on a disc, they turned up flat, because there was nowhere else to put the second image. Some are not known to exist in their original form anywhere at all. A handheld games console was the only projector they ever had.

~ the long tail ~

Nintendo tried this shape more than once. Nintendo TVii and the Wii's video channels both ran on the assumption that a games console is a reasonable place to put television. Sony and Microsoft made the same assumption in the same years and were wrong more expensively, which is its own kind of consolation.

What is left is a support page. Nintendo Video does not appear in any store and has no archive, and the shorts that survive do so because somebody pulled them off an SD card before the expiry date landed. The service was designed specifically so that would never be necessary. It turned out to be the only thing that worked.

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