First Look: iPlayer Videos Pack A Punch On Wii

The BBC’s on-demand TV and radio service, which was already available over web on Nintendo’s console but which was broken by the big N in a recent Flash upgrade, is now available as a downloadable channel from the Wii Shop – the first third-party channel to become available. Here’s my installation-and-use walkthrough

The new service looks much the same as the big-screen iPlayer which was running through the Wii’s Opera browser, with a couple of great differences…

— The video picture, which was confined to a small Flash window through Opera, now expands to fill a LCD TV and, whilst not HD, is great quality and a big improvement.

— Radio show pages – which, by nature, are static – now include background animations to prevent screen burn-in.

All in all, you’d probably say that it’s a nicer implementation than that on Virgin Media.

See BBC’s earlier announcement.